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

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

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

Mariana came to the United States after losing the hope of becoming a journalist in her home country of Venezuela. As an immigrant and the new girl on television, she was faced with a choice: be what everybody else expected or find her own voice and purpose. She realized that re-defining herself beyond labels was the only way forward. Her story, full of ups and downs, took her from the trenches of the pro-democracy movement in Caracas to Capitol Hill, while powering through family tragedy, covering politics, immigration and the Latinx community.