Manuela Ocón Aburto is one of the most solid and recognised figures in contemporary Spanish audiovisual production management. With a career spanning almost three decades, she has participated in more than twenty feature films and fiction series, covering all categories of the production department since 1996 and establishing herself as a key professional in projects of great artistic and logistical complexity.
After her first works under the orders of key filmmakers such as Carlos Saura or Fernando Fernán Gómez, her career was decisively linked to directors such as Alberto Rodríguez, Santi Amodeo, Ana Rosa Diego or Paco Baños, with whom she contributed to renewing the Andalusian and Spanish cinema scene from an authorial and contemporary point of view.
Her collaboration with Alberto Rodríguez and the production company Atípica Films has been decisive. She has worked on landmark titles such as 7 Virgins (7 vírgenes, 2004), After (After, 2008), Unit 7 (Grupo 7, 2012), Marshland (Isla mínima, 2014), Smoke & Mirrors (El hombre de las mil caras, 2016), and the television series The Plague (La peste, 2017–2019). In 2022, she served as Production Director on Prison 77 (Modelo 77), a position that earned her the Goya Award for Best Production Direction and the Carmen Award from the Andalusian Film Academy.
Throughout her career, Manuela Ocón has received numerous recognitions, including the Luz Award from the Huelva Ibero-American Film Festival, the ASECAN Josefina Molina Award, as well as several honours granted by film critics and professional associations. She holds a PhD from the Faculty of Communication Sciences at the University of Seville, with a doctoral thesis entitled Gender Inequality in the Executive Production Teams of Fiction in Spain, from which she later published the book Tiempo femenino singular (Singular feminine tense), winner of the ASECAN Award for Best Film or Audiovisual Book.
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