Mariana Atencio

Mariana Atencio is a Peabody award–winning journalist, author and speaker, included in AdWeek’s “Young Influentials”, as well as the co-founder of “Go Like”, her multimedia production company.

As a former anchor at Univision/Fusion and national correspondent at NBC News, she has traveled the world to report on some of the most volatile conflicts of our times, in both English and Spanish, for over a decade.

Mariana’s TEDx Talk on authenticity, “What Makes You Special?”, is one of the top 10 most watched on Youtube and translated into 11 languages. Her first book, Perfectly You: Embracing the Power of Being Real, was an Amazon Best Seller for Latino Biographies and selected as an Audible Editor’s Pick and AppleBooks “Must Listen.”

Her work has been honored with a Peabody, a Gracie, and an IRE award. She won Columbia University Journalism School’s “First Decade Award” and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists Presidential Award.

She has keynoted at the United Nations ‘Girl Up’ Summit; the LinkedIn annual conference alongside speakers like Michelle Obama, as well as Spotify, Microsoft and Citi Private Bank’s Autumn Dialogues.

Mariana earned her B.A. in Communications from the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello in Venezuela where she was part of the pro-democracy student movement. After the increasingly authoritarian regime shut down the biggest television station in her home country, she came to the United States on a scholarship to do her masters at Columbia University’s Journalism School.

Mariana is a 2020 Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network. You can find her on all social media @marianaatencio.