Nina Alvarez

Nina Alvarez is a journalist and documentary filmmaker Across more than three decades of reporting, her work has examined people caught in systems without accountability: immigrant families facing the loss of legal status, trafficked children failed by the systems meant to protect them, and families living with the consequences of mass incarceration.

Alvarez began her career at ABC News as a production associate on the documentary series Turning Point. She went on to cover the southeastern U.S. and Latin America from the Miami bureau, and in 1997 she established the network’s Mexico City bureau. Her reporting for World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, Good Morning America and Nightline was recognized with national Emmy Awards. She has since reported for NBC News from Baghdad, and for Univision, CNN, NPR, MTV News and Al Jazeera from the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia and Latin America.

Her documentaries include Almost American (PBS, 2024), an investigation into how political appointees upended the rules governing Temporary Protected Status to force its termination for some 400,000 people, told through one Salvadoran American family’s five-year fight to stay together. Fields of Promise, about the children of migrant farmworkers starting school in the Pacific Northwest, is her film in the Class of ‘27 trilogy (America ReFramed, PBS World Channel), which received an Alfred I. duPont–Columbia Award. She also made “The New Latinos,” her episode of the Peabody Award–winning PBS series Latino Americans. She was senior producer of the Fusion/Netflix investigative series The Naked Truth, recognized with the duPont–Columbia and Robert F. Kennedy awards, and a field producer on the Oscar-nominated HBO documentary Which Way Home. She was also story consultant and field producer on The Holly, Julian Rubinstein’s IRE Award–winning documentary about Denver anti-gang activist Terrance Roberts, which uses a shooting at a peace rally Roberts organized to investigate gang violence, policing and redevelopment in a gentrifying neighborhood.

Her film Very Young Girls (Showtime), on the commercial sexual exploitation of girls in New York, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. It has been used in advocacy for legislative change and in law enforcement training, and advocates still use it in training today. She has continued that work in print. Her investigation in the Columbia Journalism Review, “Figueroa Street and the Ethical Duty of Care,” examines how the press reports on sex trafficking.

She is in production on Singed, a documentary about the Black American war photographer Stanley Greene. She is a co-founder of the Stanley Greene Foundation and of CINESAL, El Salvador’s national film selection committee.

She holds a B.A. in Latin American Studies from New York University.