Pagan attended Columbia University undergrad and NYU Grad Film where she won a Steve Tisch Fellowship and was shortlisted for a student oscar.  After NYU Pagan initially focused on narrative -- working in post with Spike Lee, Ang Lee, and Alan Rudolph -- before pivoting to documentary. Her appreciation for dramatic structure and innate curiosity and tenacity enables her to shape character-driven intimate, compelling narratives that both engage and challenge the viewer.  Her work has covered a diverse range of subjects including the opioid epidemic, human smuggling, political polarization, Miles Davis’s electric period, New York’s early days of covid, families waiting for lung transplants, over-fishing in Thailand, and Jimmy Chin getting caught in an avalanche.  She has collaborated with many celebrated filmmakers including Robert Redford, Marc Levin, Sam Pollard, Murray Lerner, Martin Smith, James Gay-Rees, Kristi Jacobson and Matt Heineman, and produced shoots around the globe, from Iceland to Ghana, Bangladesh to Moab. Her work, including the Emmy-Award Winning and IDA-Award winning series The Trade, and the Emmy-Award winning and IDA-Award winning and Oscar shortlisted film The First Wave, and the Oscar shortlisted American Symphony, has premiered at Sundance, Sheffield, the New York Film Festival, Telluride, South by Southwest, and the London Film Festival, and screened on abc, hulu, Netflix, Showtime, HBO, Discovery, and CNN. Most recently she helped create, showrun and direct on EDGE OF THE UNKNOWN WITH JIMMY CHIN and PHOTOGRAPHER, both with Oscar winners Jimmy Chin and Chai Vaserhalyi for Disney Plus.

Pagan has also taught filmmaking at NYU graduate film, the New School, and with the HBO Young Filmmakers Lab, and frequently works as a story consultant.  She is based in Brooklyn, New York.