Diana Rico is an award-winning documentary producer-writer, internationally published journalist, book and magazine editor, curator, and critically acclaimed author specializing in the visual arts, biography, and spiritual and social issues. She is also the founder of the wordARTist, a company offering writing, editing, producing, and website content development for artists and arts organizations around the world, and of jumpstART creative coaching, powerful group workshops, e-classes, and one-on-one coaching sessions that help artists in all media dissolve creative blocks. 

As a senior producer-writer for E! Entertainment Television, she helmed 18 episodes of the hit Emmy-nominated primetime series The E! True Hollywood Story; her programs on John Lennon, Jane Fonda, Richard Pryor, Alfred Hitchcock, Steve McQueen, Sammy Davis Jr., Ben Affleck & Matt Damon, The Price Is Right, Married...With Children, the Scream movies, and other pop-culture phenomena have aired in 70 million homes nationally and 140 million homes internationally. Her additional broadcast credits include A&E Biography; SiTV’s Urban Jungle (documentary/reality); Royalty A-Z (documentary miniseries); The Style Network’s How Do I Look? (reality/makeover), and It's Good to Be... (celebrity lifestyles).

Recently Rico has moved into films concerning social and spiritual issues. In 2006 she cowrote Two Rivers, a PBS documentary about Native American reconciliation; was story editor on Journey to Chursq’bal, tracing a resurgence of Mayan shamanism in Guatemala; and developed the treatment for Angels in the Dust, an award-winning documentary about an pioneering South African AIDs orphanage. In 2007 she scripted Still Alive!/Seguimos Vivos!, a profile of a Guatemalan theater collective that works with gang youths, and Jai Uttal: The Art & Practice of Kirtan, featuring the Grammy-nominated singer who is popularizing Hindu sacred chant in the West. She has also collaborated on treatments for public television documentaries on subjects ranging from a transsexual Muslim community in Indonesia to the life of Puerto Rican independence leader Pedro Albizu Campos.

Rico's articles on the arts have appeared in GQ, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, ARTnews, Architectural Digest, Spa, Mother Jones, Tu Ciudad, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Daily News, the International Herald Tribune, and many other national and international periodicals. Her book Kovacsland: A Biography of Ernie Kovacs (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), about the pioneering 1950s tv comedian who influenced David Letterman, Garry Shandling, and the Saturday Night Live crew, was praised by Variety as “the sort of serious treatment great television artists deserve.” The book landed Rico interviews on Larry King Live!, Charlie Rose, Good Morning America, and Entertainment Tonight. She has also been Editor-in-Chief of International Documentary Magazine; Art & Architecture Writer for the Los Angeles Daily News and for NPR's Los Angeles flagship station, KCRW-FM; and Associate Editor of Emmy Magazine.

Rico has juried film and video festivals, produced sold-out live literary readings, and taught journalism and bilingual language arts for colleges. Her many honors include two Prism Award nominations, as well as grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Association of Latino Independent Producers, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, the Harwood Museum of Art, the Colorado Art Ranch, the Barbara Deming Foundation, Hedgebrook: A Retreat for Women Writers, and the New Mexico Office of the State Historian. She is on the Board of Directors of the Creativity and Consciousness Institute of Taos, which is affiliated with the University of New Mexico.

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