Diana Rico

As a biopic producer-writer, my superpower is translating life stories into dramatic, compelling entertainment for the screen. I am currently developing a biopic of ‘60s Hollywood icon Steve McQueen, an adaptation of Neile McQueen’s memoir My Husband, My Friend.

A biography obsessive since I was a little girl, I was a Senior Producer-Writer for E! Entertainment Television for seven years, primarily for the Emmy Award–nominated prime-time biography series E! True Hollywood Story. My two-hour deep dives into the lives of such entertainment icons as Steve McQueen, John Lennon, Alfred Hitchcock, Jane Fonda, Natalie Wood, Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, Burt Reynolds, and the Beatle Wives, as well as my shows on such pop-cultural benchmarks as Scream, Dallas, The Twilight Zone, and Married … with Children, have been broadcast in 70 million homes nationally and 140 million internationally.

The Entertainment Industries Council nominated my E! True Hollywood Stories on Richard Pryor and Burt Reynolds for Prism Awards for accurate depiction of substance abuse and mental health issues.

I was also a lead producer-writer on E!’s 11-hour docuseries Royalty A-Z, a look at all things Windsorian, from Princess Diana’s tragic death to royal wedding fashions to a hangout with royalist Hell’s Angels during the Queen’s Golden Jubilee. Additional TV credits include A&E Biography (writer), The Style Network's It's Good to Be... (producer-writer) and How Do I Look? (story editor), and SíTV's Urban Jungle (story editor).

I also have robust experience in print media. I’m the author of the critically acclaimed book Kovacsland: A Biography of Ernie Kovacs (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), which Variety called "the sort of serious treatment great television artists deserve." I edit books (memoir/biography, art, fiction/essays, spirituality, and Latinx/border subjects) for Sounds True, Shambhala, Museum of New Mexico Press, University of New Mexico Press, University of Arizona Press, and independent authors. As a longtime arts journalist I’ve written for ARTnews, Elle, GQ, Harper’s Bazaar, O: The Oprah Magazine, and many other periodicals. On staff I've been Editor in Chief of International Documentary Magazine, Art + Architecture Writer for the LA Daily News, and Associate Editor of Emmy: The Magazine of the Television Arts & Sciences.

My work has been honored with fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Association of Latino Independent Producers, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and numerous other organizations.

A fourth-generation Puerto Rican raised in SoCal (does that make me a Califorícan?), I left LA in 2006 and now commune with coyotes, ravens, and my four-legged familiar on the ancestral lands of the northern Tiwa people, in what is known today as Taos, New Mexico.