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 - 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, the Government of Catalonia, and Casa Garita.

She is a contributor to international media outlets including The New York Times, Bloomberg, and The Wall Street Journal, and her work has been exhibited in cities such as Dubai, London, and Barcelona. She has also worked on advertising campaigns for brands such as Xiaomi and Fundació la Caixa, and as a set photographer for HBO. 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 since 2025. She is also part of the Cinema 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 with a Postgraduate Diploma and a Master's degree in Fiction Directing at ESCAC (2023–2024), she directed and wrote her first short film, La Prona, which follows two artisanal women fishers from Cap de Creus and premiered in 2026 at the D'A Film Festival. She currently balances teaching and professional commissions with her 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 director and screenwriter. | maria.contreras.coll@gmail.com |