Mariana van Zeller is a Peabody-Award-winning correspondent for Current TV’s no-limits documentary series, “Vanguard.” This season she will report from Uganda about a proposed anti-gay law, explore a silent crisis of rape on Native American reservations, and expose the trafficking of young soccer players from Africa to Europe.

Mariana began her journalism career in her native Portugal, where she was a producer and correspondent for SIC Televisão, the nation's largest private news channel. In 2001, Mariana moved to New York to attend Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. A month into the program, she was reporting live back to Europe on the events of 9/11. Mariana's master's thesis on children asylum seekers in the US won a number of awards and earned her a job at Insight News Television, an award-winning documentary production company in London. In 2003, Mariana went undercover to report on Syrian mujahideen crossing into Iraq to fight against the US invasion. She has since camped out in the Amazon jungle to cover the battle between Brazil's Indians and miners over South America's largest diamond mine, rode the Death Train to report on the desperate risks Central American migrants take to reach the US and snuck into the swamps of Nigeria to meet with militants fighting for control of the country's oil wealth.

Mariana's work has also appeared on PBS's Frontline/World, the CBC and Channel 4 (UK). She’s fluent in Portuguese, English, Spanish, Italian and French.

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