Maria Contreras Coll is a documentary photographer, filmmaker, and educator based in Sant Feliu de Guíxols and Barcelona, Spain. She is a National Geographic Explorer and a recipient of the National Prize for Culture of Catalonia.

Her work focuses on examining how women challenge patriarchal systems and reconfigure social structures across diverse contexts. Her practice combines research, interviews, and a critical perspective on the power dynamics inherent in image-making.

She began her career documenting the refugee and migrant crisis in Melilla, Morocco, and across the European Union. Between 2017 and 2018, she lived in Nepal, where she documented how women confront menstrual restrictions, a research that led to her long-term project Women Revisiting Religion. This project explores how women redefine religion and spirituality in countries such as India, Mexico, and Austria, among others, with the support of the National Geographic Society and the Government of Catalonia.

She is a contributor to international media outlets including The New York Times and Bloomberg, and her work has been exhibited in cities such as Dubai, London, and Barcelona. She has also worked on publicity campaigns for brands such as Xiaomi.

In the educational field, she served as a visiting professor and mentor in the Postgraduate Program in Photojournalism at the Autonomous University of Barcelona from 2018 to 2024. She is currently an associate professor of photography at the Faculty of Fine Arts and has been leading workshops at ESCAC OFF since 2025. That same year, she joined the Fotografia en Curs program, organized by A Bao A Qu. She has mentored numerous documentary photography and photojournalism projects from an ethical, gender-focused, critical, and collaborative perspective.

After expanding her cinematic practice by completing a Postgraduate Diploma and a Master's degree in Fiction Directing at ESCAC (2023–2024), she developed her first short film as director and screenwriter, La Prona, which focuses on two artisanal women fishers from Cap de Creus. She currently balances teaching and professional commissions with the long-term project Entangled Destiny, on Mediterranean cultural heritage, developed with the support of National Geographic's Meridian Grant, and is in the research and writing phase of her first feature film as a director and screenwriter. | maria.contreras.coll@gmail.com |