Bio.
Diego José Mercado is a Film and TV Production undergraduate at the USC School of Cinematic Arts (Class of 2025). Originally from a town in the north of Mexico called Saltillo, he moved to the heart of Los Angeles to explore his deep passion for storytelling through visual mediums.
He believes emotional universality is found through personal specificity, aiming to tell stories that reflect his own background and experiences while providing a mirror to worlds and characters not often explored in media.
Diego specializes in film directing, writing, and editing. He has worked on countless film projects within the past year, covering various genres, styles, and lengths. As an editor, he has worked on narrative and documentary projects that have screened in mixed-media performance events like USC’s Voz Latina and even the Los Angeles Natural History Museum as part of the recent Sacrifice Zone exhibit. Coming up, he will be editing multiple narrative short films for the remainder of the year.
Recently, Diego was a studio intern for Olive Bridge Entertainment, a film and television production company founded by writer-director Will Gluck. Through the position, Diego was able to perform a wide range of tasks across the many departments of a tightly-knit company, supporting their various development needs and even taking part in the post-production process of the recent theatrical release “Anyone But You” (Sony Pictures, 2023).
As Director of the Media Production Department of Trojan Marketing Group, a full-service, student-run, pro-bono marketing agency at USC, he has worked and overseen various campaigns for LA-based businesses. Within the directing position, he oversees and supports the execution of four concurrent accounts as they research, strategize, and produce campaigns for clients like The Broad Museum and Yate Yerba Mate. During the 2021-22 cycle, Diego developed and co-produced a video commercial for Los Angeles’ biggest independent record store, Amoeba Music, which was shared across platforms to Amoeba’s audience of 250k+ followers. The following year, he directed two commercials as part of a multi-platform campaign for indie romance bookstore , The Ripped Bodice. These have amassed more than 100k combined views and interactions.
Diego has professional experience in the field of communications across various work positions from recent years. He’s a current Creative Content Assistant at the USC Office of Student Affairs, where he edits and designs materials for student-oriented social media profiles. From August 2020 to June 2021 he served as a media intern for the communications office of the prestigious Mexican institution “Tecnológico de Monterrey” on its Saltillo campus, as part of a national program titled "Storytellers." There, he acted as lead producer of an institutional podcast, wrote journalistic articles published on a national news platform, and managed the social media presence of the school.
