Do1Thing Blog

Nina is an award-winning journalist and filmmaker. She has covered world conflicts for network news and the rights of youth, women and immigrants in documentary. She has worked in the United States, Latin America, the Middle East, Central Asia, Europe and Africa. Alvarez’s goal is to produce work that informs young people about issues that affect them and their peers in the US and the world, and motivates them to take action and responsibility.

To this end, Alvarez has produced various MTV News & Documentary projects, including Aftershock:
Pakistan, about youth surviving the 2005 earthquake and Crisis, a pilot about young people living in Colombia’s war. She then co-produced, directed and photographed Very Young Girls, a verité feature documentary following the stories of several New York girls who were sexually exploited, trafficked domestically and are now trying to exit “the life.” It premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2007, broadcast on the Showtime Network in December, 2008, and has been used as a tool by advocates to change state laws that criminalize prostituted children. Alvarez also produced, directed and photographed MSNBC’s primetime special, The Battle for America’s Schools, a one-hour documentary about the legacy of Prince Edward County, the last battleground for the desegregation of schools in America.

Alvarez began her journalism career in 1989, when she produced a short film about Salvadoran refugees returning to repopulate the communities they had been forced to abandon during the war, only to be bombed by the Salvadoran military. In 1991, she was the associate producer for the PBS special, declarations. She went to the ABC News documentary unit, Turning Point, in 1993 where she was a part of a team that garnered several Emmys, a DuPont, a Golden Globe and Kennedy Award. She then became a news producer based in Miami, covering Latin America and the Caribbean, covering all POTUS trips to the region and spending as long as five months at a time covering Cuba. During this time, she was part of teams that won Emmy Awards for Breaking News and International News. She also established the Mexico City bureau, where she produced stories on the Mexican drug cartels and immigration and produced four network interviews with President Fox.

A documentarian and storyteller at heart, Alvarez left ABC News after eight years, with a solid news background and a serious respect for deadlines. The discipline of covering news has served her well in working on documentary projects, as she will produce, report, direct, shoot, script and edit complete projects. She started Zócalo Media in 2005 to focus on independent projects, which range from short multimedia presentations to long- form documentary. That year, she won a Gates Fellowship and International Reporting Fellowship to document women facing extreme post-labor trauma in Nigeria. Alvarez is currently producing her independent documentary, “Singed: a photographer’s war” about renowned American war photographer, Stanley Greene, as he takes on the assignment of his life in Afghanistan.

The daughter of Salvadoran immigrants, Alvarez is a fluent Spanish speaker and writer. She is also conversant in Portuguese. A native New Yorker, Alvarez lives in Harlem, NYC. Visit nina’s site