Mariana Liz is Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Lisbon in Portugal (FLUL) and research fellow at Centro de Estudos Comparatistas, where she coordinates the research cluster Film, Audiovisual and Contemporary Imaginaries.

She received a PhD from King’s College London in 2012 and taught at King’s, Queen Mary and the University of Leeds in the UK. After moving to Portugal in 2016, she was a Research Fellow at the the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon (ICS-ULisboa). Between 2020 and 2021 she was an adviser to the Secretary of State for Film, Audiovisual and Media, working closely with the governmental film literacy initiative Plano Nacional de Cinema (PNC).

Her main research interests are the idea of Europe in contemporary fiction and the transnational history of Portuguese film. She is the author of Euro-Visions (2016), editor of Portugal's Global Cinema (2018), and co-editor of Women's Cinema in Contemporary Portugal (with Hilary Owen, 2020), which was published in Portuguese as Realizadoras Portuguesas: Cinema no Feminino na Era Contemporânea (2023).

Mariana is the director of FLUL’s Masters programme in Culture and Communication.