Patricia Nazario

Patricia Nazario is an award-winning bilingual journalist and filmmaker whose work examines who gets access to the American Dream. A UCLA alumna with a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, she has earned more than 30 awards and honors, including an Emmy Award as associate producer, five Golden Mike Awards, four Los Angeles Press Club awards, a Florida Associated Press award and three U.S. congressional recognitions.

Nazario’s reporting has covered the 9/11 attacks in New York, hurricanes in Florida and Argentina’s 2002 economic crisis. Her coverage of Miami’s Cuban American community earned WLRN its first statewide award. She has produced international stories for NPR, Marketplace and The World, reporting on the HIV/AIDS crisis in Colombia and child labor in Ecuador. In 2021, she joined KTLA’s Rose Parade team. As a field producer, she has contributed to two L.A. Area Emmy-winning broadcasts (2024 & 2025). 

Raised partly in a working-class neighborhood in Paramount, California, Nazario directed, produced and edited Backstreet to the American Dream, a global story about race, labor, class and economic survival that unfolds through two distinct worlds of L.A. street food.

Executive produced by Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree Dolores Huerta, with Jarritos as promotional partner, the bilingual feature has screened at 14 film festivals, including Dances With Films, Newport Beach, Ethnografilm Paris and New York’s Workers Unite Film Festival, and at 18 universities and cultural centers. The film has earned 18 awards and commendations, including Best Documentary twice, Best Director, a Special Jury Prize and a Humanitarian Award. New Day Films distributes the film to schools, libraries and community organizations.

In 2025, she created Cinema. Cultura. Comunidad., a daylong film and cultural festival at the historic Gardena Cinema that brought together more than 200 filmmakers, community partners and attendees, and earned recognition from Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters. The event raised $800 for Public Counsel’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. 

Off camera, Nazario teaches sailing at California State University, Northridge. She’s an American Sailing Association-certified instructor who also teaches adult beginners at Windjammers Yacht Club in Marina del Rey.