Skip to content
MV
Guest

Mariana van Zeller

Peabody and Emmy Award-winning journalist, host of Trafficked

2 episodes First appearance 2026

Mariana van Zeller is a Peabody and Emmy Award-winning journalist and filmmaker. Born and raised in Portugal, she moved to the United States to study journalism at Columbia University. She is the host and executive producer of National Geographic’s Trafficked with Mariana van Zeller, a series that takes her inside global black markets, and she co-founded Muck Media, the production company behind documentaries including Science Fair, Mucho Mucho Amor for Netflix and American Pain for HBO. Her podcast, The Hidden Third, is a weekly dive into the underground markets that power a third of the global economy.

Her Julian Dorey Podcast appearance covered the nine days she was trapped in Niger during the coup, gold trafficking that funds terrorists, arms dealers selling to both sides, the fentanyl supply chain from Chinese precursors to a working lab, the Florida pain clinics behind American Pain, black-market organs, pig butchering in Myanmar and Ukraine’s surrogacy industry.

2 episodes · newest first

Every episode with Mariana van Zeller.

Related guests · same topics
All guests

Ed Calderon

Cartel expert, former Mexican counter-narcotics investigator

6 episodes

Kat Szulc

Mexico-based freelance journalist covering cartel activity

6 episodes