Marzena is a writer, director, and producer with a strong background in creative development. She holds a PhD from Stanford and an MFA from USC.  She is currently filming A REPORT FROM THE PLACE WHERE NOTHING HAPPENS, a legal documentary thriller set in Europe and New York. Her work has screened at over 80 festivals around the world – including Venice IFF, the Hamptons, Mar del Plata, and the Houston IFF – and aired on PBS and Canal+, earning recognition from the Rolex Mentor & Protégé Arts Initiative (finalist), Women in Film (Los Angeles), and the Academy’s Nicholl Fellowship (semifinalist), and over a dozen creative excellence awards.

Her film experience spans more than 20 productions across creative and technical roles, learning the craft alongside some of cinema’s most visionary figures, including Nina Foch, Judy Irola (ASC), Carlo and Edoardo Ponti, and Mark Harris. Beyond the set, she’s brought her storytelling instincts to HBO as a creative development consultant, and to OpenAI, where she worked as an expert on crafting complex, high-context questions to train advanced language models.

Marzena has published widely on literature, cinema, and narrative theory. She is the author of Private Topographies (Palgrave Macmillan), a book that explores the interplay of politics, narrative, and spatial imagination. Her article From Urb of Clay to the Hypodermic City: Improper Cities in Modern Latin America was selected as one of the 25 most impactful essays published in the last 25 years by the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, and featured in Latin American Cultural Studies: A Reader (Routledge, 2018). She has taught film, Latin American culture, and cultural theory at institutions such as UCLA, Stanford University, and Emory, and has delivered lectures on four continents. Her current book project, Where Nothing Happens: Semiotic Black Holes, Drifting Paradigms, and Justice à Rebours on Europe’s Periphery, investigates how narrative monoculture sustains systems of oppression and how people navigate inverted realities shaped by lawless, unseen mechanisms of control.

Born in Warsaw (Poland), she studied at the University of Budapest (Hungary), Stanford University (PhD in Latin American & Comparative Literature), and the USC School of Cinematic Arts (MFA in Film Production, with a concentration in directing and cinematography). She holds dual U.S. and European Union (EU) citizenship and resides in Atlanta.

SELECTED AWARDS