Mariana Sanz, CEO - Latin America & General Manager - Mexico, Daniel J. Edelman Holdings, Inc.
In 2022 Mariana was recognized as Best PR Professional in Latin America by PR Week Global Awards, and she was selected for the Fellowship program at the International Womens forum.
Mariana has long experience solving complex communications challenges for Latin American and global organizations, first in the public sector and international institutions arena, and then from the corporate sphere in her extensive agency practice.
She joined Edelman as General Manager for the Mexico office in 2015. Since that time, she has successfully positioned it as one of the strongest communications firms in the market, winning key industry awards, but most importantly, the trust and loyalty of global and local clients. She has assembled a solid, stable, and diverse team and continues to push the boundaries on client service excellence and integrated work, both for clients in Mexico and the region, reaching the best results in the history for Edelman Latin America.
Prior to Edelman, she was a partner at a local strategic communications agency; she was an advisor on communications and institutional relations for the CEO of Pemex. Also, in Washington D.C., she worked for the Inter-American Development Bank and for the Mexican Embassy in the United States; prior to that, she was at the Mexican Ministry of Finance.
She holds a degree on International Relations from ITAM (Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de Mexico), a masters on International Relations and International Communications from Boston University, and a masters on Political Management from the George Washington University. She is an associate at COMEXI (Mexican Council of International Affairs), a member of the Advisory Board for Educación para Compartir, a global NGO focused on education, and a member of the Advisory Bord to The Center for US-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego.
She lives in Mexico City with her husband and their two boys.
Barbara Blakely, Regional Corporate Relations Director, Shell
Barbara became the Director for Corporate Relations for Latin America and the Caribbean for Shell on August 1, 2021. She has worked for Shell for 20 years and before taking on this role she was the VP of External Relations for Projects and Technology in the Netherlands, leading external communications, engagement and social performance of a global organization that runs about $40 billion of annual spend through its supply chains and spends about $1 billion a year on research and development with about 150 projects in different phases of the development cycle. In her current role she leads a regional team accountable for government relations, internal and external communications, non-technical risk management, social performance and stakeholder management across a complex cross-business portfolio that includes upstream, downstream, midstream, NBD and portfolio activities. Barbara has led Corporate Relations in multi-billion projects that have taken FID, and led External Relations for Renewables, Hydrogen and CO2, with global presence.
Barbara has more than 25 years of experience in energy and project delivery and a Diplomatic career for the Mexican Government and crisis management.