Valeria Pivato was born in Buenos Aires. She studied Design and Filmmaking and began working as an assistant director, script supervisor and casting director with notable directors such as Juan José Campanella, from his film El mismo amor, la misma lluvia (The Same Love, the Same Rain) in 1999 to El secreto de sus ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes), winner of the Academy Award—Oscar^® for Best Foreign Film in 2010. She has also worked with Walter Salles and Pablo Trapero, among many other directors.

Valeria is a mentor and teacher at the ENERC Film School in Argentina. She was the head of the Film and Television Directing Program at PCI, the Argentine directors’ association. She is also part of the faculty at the Acting Program for Audiovisual Media at the SAGAI Foundation in Argentina. Valeria has taught courses at the University of the Americas in Ecuador and the Costa Rican Center for Film Production, and she has been a visiting professor at the Veritas University in Costa Rica since 2016.

La novia del desierto (The Desert Bride) (2017), her debut fiction feature film, premiered in the “Un certain regard” section of the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. The film was selected for numerous international festivals and received important awards such as the Colón de Oro Award for Best Feature Film at the 2017 Huelva Ibero-American Film Festival, the Coral Award for Best Debut Feature at the 2017 Havana Film Festival, the Silver Condor Award for Best Debut Feature in 2018 and the Argentores Award for Best Fiction Film Screenplay in 2018, among many others. The Desert Bride was also nominated for the Fénix and Platino Awards for Ibero-American Films and for the Sur Awards of the Argentine Film Academy, and was released theatrically in more than twenty countries, including the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, France, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Turkey and Australia.

Her film La llegada del hijo (Surfacing), an Argentine-Spanish co-production, premiered at the San Sebastián Film Festival in 2024 and won the Astor Piazzola Award for Best Film in the national competition at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival in 2024. The film was commercially released in Spain in May 2025 and in Argentina in September 2025. Valeria is currently developing her next fiction project, La ilusión de un paraíso (An Illusion of Paradise), winner of the runner-up prize in the 2023 Lola Salvador Screenplay Award, granted by the Spanish copyright management society DAMA, and one of the projects selected for the Europe-Latin America Co-production Forum at the 2025 San Sebastián Film Festival.