Patricia Riggen — Director | Biography, Movies & Career

Biography

Patricia Riggen (born June 2, 1970) is a Mexican film director. She is best known for directing the 2007 film Under the Same Moon and the 2011 Disney Channel original film Lemonade Mouth.

Riggen was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco. While in her home country, she gained experience in journalism and writing for documentaries. Riggen obtained a degree in Communication Sciences from ITESO (Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Occidente), Universidad Jesuita de Guadalajara. Her thesis work was titled "Female Directors" and allowed her to interview the four important female film directors in Mexico at the time. Riggen had many jobs up and into her early 20s, she worked as a writer for her local Guadalajara newspaper, worked for producer Bertha Navarro, and collected research on the death industry for a Guillermo Del Toro documentary. In the late 90s, while working as Production Vice President of the short films department at the Mexican Film Institute, Riggen realized she wanted to go back to school.

She moved to New York City, where she received her master's degree in directing and screenwriting at Columbia University. Riggen noted, "I had to write and direct all my exercises and English is not my first language, so I started writing all these little movies that had no dialogue". While attending Columbia, she directed two short films The Cornfield (2002) and Family Portrait (2004), a documentary, the former film won several film festival awards. Family Portrait went on to win the Sundance Film Festival Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking.

Riggen found her way into writing and producing film, though she never thought she would end up as a director, comparing the chances of landing a career as a director to the chances of landing a career as an astronaut – slim to none.

Unhappy with producing, Riggen moved to New York to pursue a career in writing. She found herself as a director after directing one exercise.