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Roger Ross Williams | |
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 Williams in 2016 | |
| Born | September 16, 1962 Easton, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Occupation(s) | Film director Screenwriter Film producer |
| Years active | 1995–present |
Roger Ross Williams (born September 16, 1962) is an American director, producer and writer and the first African American director to win an Academy Award (Oscar), with his short film Music by Prudence ; this film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film in 2009.
Williams is a member of a Gullah family from South Carolina, and has lived and worked in New York City for over twenty-five years. Williams attended Northampton Community College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and New York University in New York City.
Williams began his career in 1985, producing political satire for Comedy Central and Michael Moore's Emmy Award-winning series TV Nation . He has since produced and directed for NBC News, MSNBC, BBC, CNN and has produced work for Comedy Central, Food Network, TLC, VH1, including numerous primetime specials for Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), American Broadcasting Company (ABC) and ABC News, CBS, Sundance Channel and New York Times Television. He has also produced a documentary series for Discovery Networks and a lifestyle series, Sheila Bridges Designer Living, for Scripps Networks. He has won numerous awards for his TV work including a NAMIC Vision Award and the National Headliner for Best Human Interest Feature documentary.
Williams has directed a number of films including Life, Animated , which won the Sundance Film Festival Directing Award, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film [1] and won three Emmy Awards in 2018, including the award for Best Documentary. The film God Loves Uganda that he directed, which was shortlisted for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film and American Jail , examined the U.S. prison system and premiered on CNN and the BBC. Williams directed Traveling While Black , a virtual reality documentary / transmedia project made for Facebook's Oculus, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2019. [2] His 2019 film The Apollo , a documentary about Harlem's legendary Apollo Theater, was the opening night film of the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival.[ citation needed ]
His first narrative feature film for Amazon Studios is in pre-production. His production company, One Story Up, which he founded with Geoff Martz, [3] is producing a variety of projects including documentary series for Netflix.
The documentary film Master of Light, directed by Rosa Ruth Boesten and produced by Ilja Roomans, Anousha Nzume and Williams, was played at the music and film festival South by Southwest (SXSW) in March 2022. [4] It is a production of One Story Up and the Dutch documentary collective 'Docmakers'. [5] It is a film about the artist George Anthony Morton. [6] [7] The film was included in HBO Max that same year.
Williams is the first African American director to win an Academy Award (Oscar) with his short film Music by Prudence ; this film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film in 2009.
Williams serves on the board of Docubox Kenya, a documentary fund and mentorship program based in Nairobi that supports African filmmakers. Williams serves on the alumni advisor board of None On Record, the alumni advisory board of the Sundance Institute, and, since 2016, the Board of Governors for the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, serving as chair of the Documentary Branch and the Documentary Diversity Committee He is also a trustee of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, the first major museum in Africa dedicated to contemporary art. [8] Furthermore, he is a member of the Advisory Board of Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, and of the board of the Tribeca Film Institute.
He splits his time between upstate New York and Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Richard Edmund Williams was a Canadian-British animator, voice actor, and painter. A three-time Academy Award winner, he is best known as the animation director on Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) -- for which he won two Academy Awards -- and as the director of his unfinished feature film The Thief and the Cobbler (1993). His work on the short film A Christmas Carol (1971) earned him his first Academy Award. He was also a film title sequence designer and animator. Other works in this field include the title sequences for What's New Pussycat? (1965) and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966) and title and linking sequences in The Charge of the Light Brigade and the intros of the eponymous cartoon feline for two of the later Pink Panther films. In 2002 he published The Animator's Survival Kit, an authoritative manual of animation methods and techniques, which has since been turned into a 16-DVD box set as well as an iOS app. From 2008 he worked as artist in residence at Aardman Animations in Bristol, and in 2015 he received both Oscar and BAFTA nominations in the best animated short category for his short film Prologue.
Philip Alexander Gibney is an American documentary film director and producer. In 2010, Esquire magazine said Gibney "is becoming the most important documentarian of our time."
This Is That Productions was one of the leading independent feature film production companies. Established in 2002, and based in New York City, the company was founded and fully owned by Ted Hope, Anne Carey, Anthony Bregman, and Diana Victor. The four partners previously worked together at the groundbreaking Good Machine, which Ted Hope co-founded in 1991.
Michael Victor Sporn was an American animator who founded his New York City-based company, Michael Sporn Animation in 1980, and produced and directed numerous animated TV specials and short spots.
Nanette Burstein is an American film and television director. Burstein has produced, directed, and co-directed several documentaries including the Academy Award nominated and Sundance Special Jury Prize winning film On the Ropes.
Elizabeth Freya Garbus is an American documentary film director and producer. Notable documentaries Garbus has made are The Farm: Angola, USA,Ghosts of Abu Ghraib,Bobby Fischer Against the World,Love, Marilyn,What Happened, Miss Simone?, and Becoming Cousteau. She is co-founder and co-director of the New York City-based documentary film production company Story Syndicate.
Teddy Leifer is a British film and television producer. He founded Rise Films in 2006, a London-based production company, and was nominated for an Academy Award in 2023.
Shine Global Inc, is a non-profit media company that was founded in 2005 by Susan MacLaury, and Albie Hecht. Susan MacLaury is the Executive Director of Shine Global. Shine Global has produced projects including War/Dance, a 2008 Academy Award Nominee for Best Documentary and Inocente, the Academy Award Winner for Best Documentary Short Subject in 2013.
Cynthia Wade is an American television, commercial and film director, producer and cinematographer based in New York City. She has directed documentaries on social issues including Shelter Dogs in 2003 about animal welfare and Freeheld in 2007 about LGBT rights as well as television commercials and web campaigns. She has won over 40 film festival awards, won an Oscar in 2008, and was nominated for her second Oscar in 2013.
Jeffrey Friedman is an American filmmaker. In 2021, he and Rob Epstein won a Grammy Award for their work on the documentary film Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice
Tia Lessin is an American documentary filmmaker. Lessin has produced and directed documentaries and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary and the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Documentary.
The 26th annual Sundance Film Festival was held from January 21, 2010, until January 31, 2010, in Park City, Utah.
God Loves Uganda is a 2013 American documentary film produced and directed by Roger Ross Williams, which premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. It explores connections between evangelicalism in North America and in Uganda, suggesting that the North American influence is the reason behind the controversial Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Act, which at one point raised the possibility of the death penalty for gays and lesbians. The filmmakers follow a group of young missionaries from the International House of Prayer in their first missionary effort in another nation, as well as interviewing several evangelical leaders from the US and Uganda.
Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi is an American documentary filmmaker. She was the director, along with her husband, Jimmy Chin, for the film Free Solo, which won the 2019 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The film profiled Alex Honnold and his free solo climb of El Capitan in June 2017. Their first scripted film venture was Nyad, a biopic chronicling Diana Nyad's quest to be the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida.
Motto Pictures is a documentary production company based in Brooklyn, New York specializing in producing and executive producing documentary features. Motto secures financing, builds distribution strategies, and creatively develops films, and has produced over 25 feature documentaries and won numerous awards.
Julie Goldman is an American film producer and executive producer. She founded Motto Pictures in 2009. She is an Oscar-nominated and Emmy Award-winning producer and executive producer of documentary feature films and series.
Life, Animated is a 2016 American documentary by director Roger Ross Williams. It is co-produced by Williams with Julie Goldman, Carolyn Hepburn and Christopher Clements. Life, Animated is based on journalist Ron Suskind's 2014 book Life, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism, which tells the story of his son, Owen Suskind, who struggled with autism and learned how to communicate with the outside world through his love of Disney films.
Ryan White is a documentary producer and director best known for his Netflix documentary film Pamela, a Love Story, Amazon Prime's Good Night Oppy, which won five Critics Choice Awards including Best Documentary and Best Director, and his Emmy-nominated Netflix series The Keepers. White's previous films include the HBO movie The Case Against 8, which won Sundance's Directing Award and was nominated for two Emmys, the documentary film Ask Dr. Ruth, and Coded, which was shortlisted for the Academy Award.
Flee is a 2021 independent adult animated documentary film directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen. An international co-production with Denmark, France, Norway, and Sweden, it follows the story of a man under the alias Amin Nawabi, who shares his hidden past of fleeing his home country of Afghanistan to Denmark for the first time. Riz Ahmed and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau serve as executive producers and narrators for the English-language dub version.
Sara Dosa is an American documentary director and producer. Dosa wrote, produced and directed the 2022 documentary film Fire of Love, which was nominated for a BAFTA and an Academy Award. Dosa won the 2023 DGA Award for Outstanding Directing for the film. Her other works have received Emmy and Independent Spirit Award, as well a Peabody win.
Confronting the way we understand and talk about race in America, this virtual reality documentary immerses the viewer in the long history of restriction of movement for black Americans and the creation of safe spaces in our communities.
Founded by Oscar and Emmy Award-winning director Roger Ross Williams and Emmy Award-winning producer Geoff Martz, One Story Up specializes in creating both socially and artistically driven documentary films, television, series, animation and VR.
Winner Sundance directing award: U.S. documentary
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