Hazel is an award-winning documentary filmmaker.
Born in Colombia, Hazel is a NYC-based filmmaker who shares the stories of women from underrepresented communities fighting to overcome intersectional injustice historically and today.
Storming Caesars Palace, Hazel's first feature-length documentary, premiered as the Opening Night film at the BlackStar Film Festival in 2022 winning the coveted Shine Award, and has screened at over 70 festivals and community events with partners. The film broadcast nationally on PBS’s Independent Lens series in 2023 with over 1.3M viewers tuning-in, was in the top 3 streamed IL episodes that season, and is streaming on PBS.
Previously, Hazel was a story producer for the four-part CNN Originals series Vegas: The Story of Sin City, and the four-part Radical Media/PBS series American Portrait.
Hazel also served as a development producer on the forthcoming four-hour series Creating the New World: The Transatlantic Slave Trade directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Stanley Nelson.
Hazel directed and produced 10 hour-long episodes of PBS’s celebrity genealogy series, Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. since 2014. Hazel’s episodes feature: Christiane Amanpour, Ann Curry, Lisa Ling; Marisa Tomei, Sheryl Sandberg, Kal Penn; Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan; Ty Burrell, Joe Madison; Scarlett Johannson, Paul Rudd, John Turturro; Amy Schumer, Aziz Ansari, Maya Rudolph; Jimmy Kimmel, Norman Lear, Bill Hader; Richard Branson, Maya Lin, Frank Gehry; Lupita Nyong’o, Carmelo Anthony, Ana Navarro; Sting, Sally Field, and Deepak Chopra.
Hazel created and produced a five-part, digital-first, short-form docu-series about the daily lives of often-overlooked, low-income New Yorkers called, My Everyday Hustle. Part of WNET’s, multi-platform public media initiative, Chasing the Dream: Poverty & Opportunity in America, the series premiered at Tumblr Headquarters, streamed on PBS.org, and broadcast on PBS’ WORLD channel in 2017.
Hazel produced Roots: A History Revealed for HISTORY, which was nominated for a NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Documentary Television. Produced in connection with A&E’s reboot of Alex Haley’s mini-series Roots, this special provided an unflinching look at the history of slavery in America. The one-hour director’s cut of the film screened at the Bushwick Film Festival in Brooklyn in 2016.
Hazel co-produced two hours of the six-hour series, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., which was honored with Emmy, Peabody, Alfred I. duPont-Columbia, and NAACP Image awards.
Over the years, Hazel has worked on documentaries for HBO, FRONTLINE, AMC, ABC News, HISTORY, and A&E. She lives in NYC with her family.