Dan Barrios

Dan Barrios was born into a military family. He grew up in Europe during the Cold War and spent his youth studying, traveling and exploring World War II battlefields and cultural locations in Germany / "East" Germany, France, Spain and other locations rich in history which would later inspire his creative projects. He attended university in Tennessee on an ROTC scholarship studying Ibero-American studies, Spanish and French. Upon graduation, he was commissioned into the U.S. Army as a Second Lieutenant in the Military. He graduated from the U.S. Army Air Assault and Airborne (Paratrooper) Schools. He served with distinction around the globe in a variety of humanitarian, diplomatic, and special operations missions in over twenty countries and eight U.S. Embassies, including tours of duty in Venezuela, Panama, Egypt and Afghanistan. He was promoted to the rank of Major and received many commendations. After his military service, he joined the Federal Government and continued to serve around the globe with the Dept. of Justice, Dept. of Defense, Dept. of the Navy, Dept. of Homeland Security, U.S. Army, FBI, and other agencies. During his many travels, he did a three-year tour of duty in Los Angeles California and it was at this time that he was exposed to the world of full-bore film production. He was cast in a small Netherlands documentary production called: A day in the Life as a Private Investigator and he thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Soon, he began to find his career bringing him into more and more contact with the film industry and on location sites of productions such as HBO's Entourage, Al Pacino's S1m0ne, Tim Allen's The Shaggy Dog, LOST, Hawaii Five-0 and others. Upon observing the logistical ballet of time, people and equipment operating in a fine-tuned, time-constrained manner,He recognized that his own military and organizational skill sets would fit perfectly into this industry. It was then that he had found his calling and he began to make life changes in order to pursue his new passion. In 2002, he began networking, studying the craft and writing screenplays. He leveraged his past military and government experience and started his own independent film production company called Spartan Films, which specialized in military technical consulting for film and began to support film production for the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy. He earned a Masters of Arts degree from the American University in Washington D.C. in 2009 majoring in Producing for Film and Video and was a stand out in his cohort at the top of his class. He won several awards at film festivals for comedic shorts and moved on to produce independent feature films including the drama Fair is Fair and the paranormal thriller Spectres. In 2010 Dan was offered a once in a lifetime opportunity to work as a Cinematographer and Field Producer with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in Washington D.C. and around the world to work in extreme and hazardous production with the U.S. Border Patrol. He has served on the cutting edge of U.S. foreign policy and along side the Secretary of Homeland Security. In this capacity he has gone on to helm several original award-winning narrative fiction productions. His field action and aircraft footage has been featured in well-known productions such as National Geographic's Border Wars, To Catch a Smuggler and Discovery Channel's Extreme Smuggling, Network news and all over the worldwide web. Dan is an avid scuba diver and adventurer and splits his work time between Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and on location on the U.S. / Mexican border.