Mariana Santos is a Portuguese girl who wants to change the world, and is working on it right now as the Founder and CEO of Chicas Poderosas, a global community that promotes female leadership and generates knowledge to shape the future of the media, one chica at a time. She started this project started five years ago at Stanford. She’s a visual storyteller who did groundbreaking work as a member of the interactive team at The Guardian in London. A trained animator, she pioneered the newsroom’s use of motion graphics to make data stories more compelling. She leads design thinking workshops to increase multidisciplinary approach to storytelling, and she is a leader in community transformation and digital training.
In addition to running Chicas Poderosas, Mariana also is a public speaker and moderator on media innovation, women empowerment through technology and digital leadership, as well as alumni of the JSK Journalism Knight Fellowship at Stanford, 2015.
Until 2016, she was the Director of Interactive and animation at Fusion Media, a joint-venture between Univision and Disney ABC. She was also the the Knight Chair of Innovation at Florida International University in 2015/16 and a 2014 ICFJ Knight International Journalism Fellow, where she worked all across Latin America in major newsrooms and with independent journalists.
