Helena Petta is a physician and filmmaker. She earned a PhD in Public Health from the University of São Paulo.

She is the director of “Out of breath", awarded as the Best Documentary at the It’s All True International Documentary Film Festival (2022). The movie approaches the COVID 19 pandemic from the perspective of the caregivers, revealing the human face of a collective battle against COVID 19 in Brazilian public health system. She also created of the TV medical series Basic Unit (Unidade Básica) about health workers in Primary Care in the Brazilian context. The script was awarded as the best TV series script by the Brazilian Association of Screenwriters (ABRA) in 2016. She published the book "Basic Unit: a Brazilian public health on TV," by Hucitec (2020).