Quick Facts
Biography
Garrett Bradley is an American filmmaker and director of short films, feature films, documentaries, and television. Bradley is known for blending cinematic genres to investigate the larger sociopolitical significance embedded within the everyday moments of her subjects’ lived experience.
Biography and works
Bradley was born in New York City to abstract painters, Suzanne McClelland and Peter Bradley.
She studied religion at Smith College, and then got her MFA in Directing at UCLA. In 2012, she moved to New Orleans, where she made her first feature film with assistance from IFP Narrative Labs, Below Dreams. Bradley based the film, which premiered at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival, on interviews she had with fellow riders on the Greyhound bus. The film won a special jury award at the New Orleans Film Festival.
Her short documentary Alone focuses on her friend Aloné Watts, whose fiance was incarcerated in a private prison. This short showed at Sundance in 2017 and won the Short Form Jury Award in nonfiction. Also in 2017, she traveled to Japan and got the idea for her documentary short The Earth is Humming, which is about Japan's earthquake preparedness.
Bradley's most recent documentary short, America, was called by Guardian film critic Simran Hans the "most original film" she saw at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.
Awards and Honors
- 2019 Rome Prize Fellow
- 2019 Creative Capital Grantee
- 2018 Field of Vision Fellowship
- 2018 Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellowship
- 2018 Warhol Foundation Grantee
- 2017 Oscar Contender (Shortlist), ALONE
- 2017 Sundance Short Film Jury Award: Non-Fiction
- 2016 Ford Foundation Grantee
- 2014 Art Matters Foundation Grantee
- 2014 Artadia New Orleans Prospect 3 Artist Award
- 2001 Jury Award: Brooklyn International Bridge Film Festival (Juried by Stanley Crouch)
Festivals/ Showcases
- Sundance Film Festival: 2019, 2017
- New Directors/ New Films: 2019
- Hot Docs: 2019, 2018
- Sheffield Film Festival: 2019
- SXSW: 2018
- LA Film Festival: 2018
- Natural History Museum: 2018
- Aspen Shortsfest: 2018
- AFI Docs: 2018
- Denver Film Festival: 2018
- Imagine Science Film Festival: 2018
- New Orleans Film Festival: 2018, 2015, 2014
- DokuFest: 2018
- Festival du Nouveau Cinema: 2015, 2014
- Hammer Museum: 2015
- International Film Festival Rotterdam: 2015
- US Embassy, Tel Aviv: 2015
- Prospect 3, New Orleans: 2015
- CPH:DOX I CPH:MARKET Copenhagen: 2014
- Tribeca Film Festival: 2014