Alma Media Lab, the Miami-based publishing-to-screen company launched in January 2026, is building its first slate around high-profile Latin American creative partnerships, led by Chile’s Francisca Alegría and Fernanda Urrejola, co-showrunners of Prime Video’s epic saga “The House of the Spirits.”
The fledgling company is positioning itself around books and series developed at the same time, in close collaboration with authors, with a focus mainly on the U.S. Hispanic and Latin American market. Its model is inspired by companies including Hello Sunshine and Alloy Entertainment, but Alma Media Lab is aiming that approach at Spanish-language and Hispanic storytelling ecosystems.
“What makes Alma different is its method: a discipline of strategic storytelling, built on 25 years of television and a foundation in philosophy, that adds value to creators’ work at every stage. The story is refined on the page, published as a book and adapted for the screen with its own author — creators keep their voice and their rights protected, and buyers receive material that arrives developed, proven and ready,” said Coca Gómez, co-founder and chief content officer of Alma Media Lab.
Gómez will serve as head writer on the drama series being developed by Alegría and Urrejola. Details of the project’s title and plot have not been disclosed in the source material, but Alegría framed the collaboration as a continuation of the creative ambitions behind “The House of the Spirits.”
“We’re extremely happy to be developing a show that celebrates one of the juiciest pillars of our modern Latin American identity alongside prolific writer/creator Coca Gómez, whose long career in television has shaped some of our country’s most memorable stories,” Alegría said. “Fernanda and Coca have known each other for over 15 years and now we’ve found the story that finally brings them together as creative partners. After ‘The House of the Spirits,’ we’re chasing that same instinct: stories rooted in Latin America that don’t just travel, but redefine what audiences worldwide expect from our countries’ storytelling.”
A publishing-to-screen push for Hispanic and Latin American stories
Gómez, a London-born Chilean writer whose credits include the Chilean series “Cerro Alegre” and “Machos,” both of which she co-created, said Alma Media Lab is moving into territory that has not yet been fully built for the markets it is targeting.
“The publishing-to-screen model has already built some of television’s biggest franchises in English. In the U.S. Hispanic and Latin American market, its equivalent has yet to be built,” Gómez noted.
Since its January launch, Alma Media Lab has signed a number of development deals with Hispanic creators. Among the company’s early partners is Latin American bestselling author Carla Guelfenbein. Alma Media Lab holds exclusive rights to adapt two of Guelfenbein’s novels with her: “In the Distance With You” (“Contigo en la distancia”), winner of the Alfaguara Prize, and “The Nature of Desire” (“La naturaleza del deseo”).
Guelfenbein described the move from solitary writing into collaboration with Gómez as a major creative shift.
“Novelists spend so much of our lives writing alone. To step out of that solitude and encounter Coca’s agile, brilliant and extraordinarily generous mind has been an exhilarating creative experience,” Guelfenbein said.
She added that “‘The Nature of Desire’ is an emotionally charged portrait of passionate love, delving into its most intoxicating heights and devastating depths – a story of longing, risk and transformation. The novel captivated readers with extraordinary enthusiasm and the series promises to ignite that same fervor, drawing viewers into a world they will be eager to experience, discuss and share.”
Memoir, premium series and audio expansion
Alma Media Lab also holds exclusive rights to the memoir of Federico Arellano, a prominent Colombian jurist, law professor, human rights expert and defense lawyer. Arellano spent 37 years pursuing the truth about the bombing of Avianca Flight 203, which has long been attributed to Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.
According to Gómez, Arellano’s book is set to arrive at the end of the year as the first title from Alma Publishing, Alma Media Lab’s own imprint, with a premium series being developed in parallel.
“I present my opera prima, the account of a legitimate fight, of the abrupt change of course in my life and of the sharps and flats that the score of my existence has set before me,” Arellano said. “It stands as an instrument of historical memory — of the violent course of our grieving nation. It is the complete story of a boy who dreamed of being an artist and became a warrior; a survivor more than a victim, and today a distinguished jurist, inspired by the love of God and by the legacy of his beloved father, still claimed to this day, living between the case files and the songs of his superhero.”
Alma Media Lab’s slate also includes an audiobook trilogy reimagining “Machos,” the telenovela that marked a generation across Latin America and was sold to more than 40 countries.
The trilogy is a work-for-hire commission for Storytel and RDF Media, Canal 13’s audio arm. RDF Media’s Emisor Podcasting studio produced “Caso 63,” described in the source material as the leading scripted original podcast in Latin America. “Caso 63” was adapted in English by Spotify as “Case 63,” starring Julianne Moore and Oscar Isaac. Storytel and RDF Media hold the rights to the “Machos” property.
For Gómez, Alma Media Lab’s ambitions extend beyond its core regional targets because of the size of the Spanish-speaking audience. “The potential reach of these projects goes beyond the U.S. Hispanic and Latin American markets given the fact that 600 million people speak Spanish worldwide,” she said.