Dan Neira

Dan Neira has spent four decades on the production side of film, television, and advertising. He is spending this chapter making the films he set out to make in the first place.

Born in Argentina and raised in Southern California, Neira earned a B.A. in Religion and Philosophy from Loma Linda University in 1979 and went to work in Spanish-language television, joining Univision as an associate producer and director. From there he moved to The Media Center, an international television production company based in Thousand Oaks, California, where for four years he traveled the world producing programming on health, family, and education. The assignments were unglamorous. The training was total. Field production on three continents, small crews, real deadlines.

In 1987 he founded Total Media Productions and began directing national commercial campaigns. Over the next decade his work reached air for Verizon Wireless, McDonald's, Subway, and Red Bull. Commercial directing taught him the discipline that still governs his features. Every frame is accountable to the story. Nothing survives that does not earn its place.

Features followed. Neira directed, co-wrote, and produced Immortal Combat (1994), starring Sonny Chiba, Roddy Piper, Meg Foster, and Tommy Lister. In 1997 he founded Axiom Entertainment, a feature film production and distribution company, and assembled a library of more than sixty titles that he took to the American Film Market and Cannes. He learned the business of film from the side most directors never see: acquisitions, presales, territory deals, and the arithmetic that decides which movies actually get made.

The directing ran through the next decade. The thriller The Shoot (2003) with Kim Morgan Greene. The drama Spin (2007) with Fernando Carrillo, Shalim Ortiz, Elika Crespo, and David Selby. Wanna Be Me! (2008), starring Lacey Chabert and Patrick Kilpatrick, and the drama Touched (2009), with Aloma Wright, Chris Gartin, and Shalim Ortiz, both produced by Jackie Watson. Then A Way with Murder (2009), starring Michael Madsen and Justin Hartley, with Morgan Greene reprising her role. That one is a sequel that reopens The Shoot's case years after it was closed and turns the original inside out. It was built by folding the existing footage into a new narrative, which made a second feature out of an asset most companies would have written off.

Then the industry changed underneath everyone, and Neira went where the audience went.

In 2007 he founded Burn Media Group. What started as a video marketing and search company became a YouTube advertising specialist, then an AI-first media and automation agency serving clients across healthcare, legal, and professional services. Those years taught him what most filmmakers of his generation never had to learn: how audiences are actually built and held, how video is distributed and measured at scale, and how artificial intelligence changes what a small team can produce. That is not time away from filmmaking. It is a second education, and he is bringing all of it back to the work.

Cineira Studios is where it lands. Neira founded the company as a family-owned independent film and television studio, built with his son Joshua and designed to outlast them both. Cineira develops and owns entertainment IP with spiritual depth and broad appeal: stories about redemption, moral courage, and the search for truth, made with craft and respect. Films with meaning, without preaching.

The slate is led by Deadly Winter, a feature in active development and packaging with Neira producing. Behind it sit the epic A Dweller on Two Planets and the short film Through Her Eyes.

Neira lives and works in Southern California.