Mariana is a video essayist and scholar at the intersection of Media Studies, Anthropology, and Economics.

She is best known for building an audience of over 150,000 on her YouTube channel The Morbid Zoo. Originally created as part of her Masters thesis in Film Studies, the scope of the channel has expanded from analysis of solely fictional monsters in the horror genre to expressions of social pathology and cultural tension across the mass media environment.

Currently, she is a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Institute of Communications Research, an interdisciplinary doctoral program that encourages its students to build their own Communications curriculum out of different academic disciplines. Her dissertation is a participant ethnography of online leftism, where she explores the implications of online political discourse being subordinate to the ideologically capitalist mechanisms of social media platforms. She is writing her dissertation as a series of video essay scripts, with intentions to make some headway in the long process of reimagining the traditional academic model of research and publishing for the digital age.