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Pedro Cota: From Student Filmmaker to NASA Video Producer

Pedro Cota
Pedro Cota is a video producer for NASA en español the agency's Science Mission Directorate.

Lee esta historia en español aquí.

Pedro Cota is a video producer for NASA en español (NASA’s Spanish communications program), working for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate. Cota, who joined NASA in August 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic and working remotely, produces video content in Spanish that focuses on the scientific missions and programs across the agency and highlights Hispanic employees and their contributions to NASA. He also creates and curates multimedia content for social media platforms. He co-created and directed the first broadcast in Spanish of a planetary landing: a show named Juntos Perseveramos (Together we Persevere), for the Mars 2020 Perseverance landing on February 18, 2021. During the 2021 Hispanic Heritage Month, Pedro is producing a new season of the series Hispan@s de la NASA.

“It’s a privilege for me to be able to share the latest from NASA with people all over the world who speak Spanish, my native language,” said Cota who was born in San Diego and grew up across the border in Tijuana, México. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in film at University of California, Berkeley in 2010 and earned his master’s in journalism with an emphasis in documentary filmmaking from the UC Berkeley School of Journalism. Before NASA, Cota worked as an associate producer for a PBS Frontline documentary and was a finalist for the 2020 Student Academy Awards for a short documentary he co-produced.

In this image taken on January 2021, Cota is in the Mars Yard at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, standing in front of the Optimism rover (Perseverance’s twin on Earth) during a video shoot with Diana Trujillo.

Image Courtesy of Pedro Cota