Gregory Allen Biography
Gregory Allen is a Daytime Emmy and Grammy award-winning documentary filmmaker and cinematographer who recently directed and co-produced the multiple Daytime Emmy-winning series Pan y Circo for Amazon Prime, hosted by Diego Luna.
Over the past 22 years, he has produced, directed, and shot stories for platforms like the BBC, National Geographic, Netflix, and Amazon Prime. He has also created dozens of music videos and documentaries for some of Latin America's most talented artists under labels such as EMI, Universal Music, and Sony Music.
He won a Daytime Emmy in 2020 for directing and co-producing the series Pan y Circo (Bread and Circus), hosted by Diego Luna, and a Latin Grammy in 2014 for his intimate documentary about the Mexican band Café Tacvba.
After graduating, he spent two years in London Soho as an Avid editor on multiple music videos and short films with Red Square Editing, including the classic video Wannabe by the Spice Girls. He moved to Mexico City in 1996 to edit the documentary series Aventura for Channel 22, directed by Grace Quintanilla.
In the late '90s, Gregory brought his knowledge of non-linear Avid editing and VFX to Mexico’s commercial industry. He worked as an editor, post-producer, and special VFX supervisor on numerous commercial campaigns throughout Mexico and Latin America. In 2001, after the events of 9/11, he turned his attention to documenting people's lives and spent over a decade as a cameraman, editor, and story producer, covering major events in Central and Latin America for the BBC and ABC News. This immersion into Latin American culture and its environmental, social, and political structures honed his skills as an independent documentary filmmaker.
In 2004, Gregory co-directed, shot, and edited his first TV documentary, El Amo del Lounge, for Canal Once TV about the legendary composer, bandleader, musician, and pioneer of stereo sound, Juan Garcia Esquivel. The film was nominated for four Pantalla de Cristal awards (Mexico's BAFTAs), winning Best Visual Effects. It was also shown at numerous festivals, including the prestigious Havana Film Festival in Cuba in 2005.
In 2007, he shot, directed, and co-produced his first feature-length documentary, Papalotzin - The Flight of the Monarch Butterfly, which followed the magnificent 5,000 km Monarch butterfly migration from Canada to Mexico in a microlight piloted by Vico Volador Gutierrez. Papalotzin won Best Documentary Film at the Festival Internacional del Aire, FIA El Yelmo, Spain in July 2008.
During his journalistic career, he covered the Honduran coup d'état, the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010, and the demise of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 2013, as well as many natural disasters across the region. He filmed and produced documentaries like Life on the Line for the UN Human Rights Commission, following migrants across Mexico on La Bestia (The Beast) as they traveled atop freight trains riddled with hostilities, as well as numerous narco stories during Mexico's war on drugs. He also covered the Brazilian World Cup and the Olympics and became adept at delivering stories from remote locations on extreme deadlines. Gregory also worked extensively as a freelancer for the likes of CNN, Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, Al Jazeera, The Times, and CGTN.
In 2011, he was hired as the assistant director, cinematographer, post-producer, and editor on the musically driven documentary film Hecho En Mexico, directed by Duncan Bridgman. Inspired by this immersion into music, Gregory founded Plural Films as an independent production company dedicated to creativity and innovation in documentary and music video production. He produced, directed, shot, and edited numerous music videos and music documentaries over the years for some of the top Latin American and Spanish artists, including Julieta Venegas, DLD, Moenia, Ana Torroja, and Mexico's iconic band Café Tacvba. It was his music documentary about Café Tacvba, El Objeto Antes Llamado Disco, la Película, that won him a Grammy in 2014.
In October 2018, he documented the arduous 4,000 km journey of the Ramo's family from Guatemala, with the Migrant Caravan from Chiapas to Los Angeles, California, for his ongoing passion project Primero Dios.
During 2019 and 2020, Gregory directed and co-produced the multiple Emmy award-winning series Pan y Circo for Amazon Prime Video, created and hosted by Diego Luna. Following this, in 2022, he directed the Mexican chapter for Chris Hemsworth and Darren Aronofsky's Limitless docuseries for National Geographic and Disney. He also served as a director and cinematographer in Mexico for David Attenborough’s new Green Planet series for the BBC. In 2023, Gregory acted as a VFX supervisor on the Hollywood film Love Lies Bleeding, starring Kristen Stewart and Ed Harris, produced by A24 and Film4.
Gregory is currently innovating new techniques in content creation for immersive and extended reality (XR) experiences, which heighten sensory awareness and deepen our connection with nature. He recently completed a museum exhibition, Delirium. He is also writing and developing documentaries and series that explore our relationship with nature and the human condition, aiming to tell stories that have a transformative effect on audiences, encouraging them to move from a state of apathy and inaction to reflection and engagement.
Read Less