On July 8, 2020, the world learned that the talented, inspiring, iconic thirty-three-year-old actress, singer and advocate Naya Rivera had drowned while swimming in Lake Piru near Santa Clarita with her four-year-old son Josey, who was found alone on their rented boat.

With her diverse acting roles, Rivera is seen as having one of the earliest, most prominent and most profound examples of both Afro-Latino representation and queer Latinx (as Santana in Glee) representation on prime-time television. She has been described as a gay icon and "a true icon for all black and brown girls.” In 2011, the president of GLAAD said that Rivera's storyline as Santana was "one that hasn't been told on a prime-time network television show at the level particularly by an LGBT teen of color".

As a child and teen actor, Rivera landed roles in many transformative shows including The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Family Matters, The Jersey, Live Shot, Baywatch, Smart Guy, House Blend, Even Stevens, The Master of Disguise and The Bernie Mac Show. Rivera got her breakthrough role in 2009 as lesbian cheerleader Santana Lopez on the renowned television series Glee. Although the role was originally quite small and didn’t include relationship storylines, it evolved as Naya made it her own.

She received critical acclaim and various awards for the role, including a SAG Award, an ALMA Award, as well as earning two Grammy Award nominations. Due to her varied roles in her three decades as a performer, Rivera is seen as having been a vanguard of Afro-Latino and queer representation on television.

Multiple scholarly works were written during Rivera's lifetime focusing on the significant changes that her portrayal of Santana brought to television with non- stereotypical stories in relation to race and sexuality – including a unique coming out story and relationship: not being explicitly black- or white- coded, as well as being a minority involved in main storylines not focused on sexual or gender identities. As early as 2013, Isabel Guzmán wrote a chapter on Rivera playing "the first lesbian Latina on primetime television,” predicting that Naya “would be honored for her compassionate and complex representation.”

Writers Jorge Reyes(wga) and Gabriela Revilla Lugo (wga) are attached and available to pitch project to production companies/buyers.
Family members have cooperated with Naya Rivera's history.