RODNEY EVANS – WRITER/DIRECTOR/PRODUCER

RODNEY EVANS is a fiction and documentary film writer, director and producer. His debut fiction feature BROTHER TO BROTHER won the Special Jury Prize in Drama at the Sundance Film Festival. The film had its European premiere at the Berlinale and garnered four Independent Spirit Award nominations including Best First Film, Best First Screenplay, Best Debut Performance for Anthony Mackie and Best Supporting Male Performance for Roger Robinson.

Evans has received funding from The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, The Ford Foundation’s JustFilms Program, The Creative Capital Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, The NY State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), The Independent Television Service (ITVS) and Black Public Media (BPM). His second fiction feature,
THE HAPPY SAD, has played at over thirty film festivals throughout the world and had its U.S. theatrical premiere in August 2013 at the IFC Center in NYC an the Sundance Sunset Cinema in Los Angeles. He has taught at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Princeton, Cooper Union and Swarthmore.

His latest feature length film, VISION PORTRAITS, had its World Premiere in the Documentary Feature Competition at the 2019 SXSW Film Festival and won the Jury Award for Best Documentary at Frameline - The San Francisco Int'l. LGBTQ+ Film Festival. It was released theatrically at the Metrograph in NYC in August 2019 and went on to play to universal critical acclaim in major U.S. cities. The film screened virtually at the Whitney Museum for a week in honor of the 30th Anniversary of the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in July 2020. Evans was the recipient of the 2019 Frameline Award for LGTBQ+ representation, a Sundance Momentum Fellowship for 2020 and a Ford/Mellon Disability Futures Fellowship for 2021. He is an NEH/Firelight Media Spark Fund Recipient for 2022. His latest nonfiction short PORTAL is currently touring the film festival circuit. He earned a BFA in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University and an MFA from The California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Film/Video Production.