Bao Nguyen is an award-winning filmmaker whose past work has been seen in the New York Times, HBO, Vice, MTV, NBC, Vogue, PBS, ARTE, among many others. He has directed, produced, and shot a number of short films, which have played internationally in numerous festivals and museums including MoMA and the Smithsonian. His graduate thesis film, “Julian”, won a CINE Golden Eagle Award, the Best Student Documentary Short at the Palm Springs ShortsFest, Special Jury Prize at DOCNYC, and was nominated for an IDA Award. He was the producer and cinematographer of “Nuoc 2030”, a feature narrative set in near future Vietnam which opened the Panorama section of the 2014 Berlin International Film Festival and was a recipient of the Tribeca Film Institute Sloan Filmmaker Award.

His feature doc directorial debut, “Live From New York” opened the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival and was broadcast nationally in primetime on NBC, preceding the 41st season premiere of Saturday Night Live. His most recent film, "Be Water", world premiered in competition at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and broadcast on ESPN's 30 for 30 series. He is a 2011 PBS/WGBH Producers Workshop Fellow, an alumnus of the 2012 and 2014 Berlinale Talent Campus, and a Firelight Media Fellow. He earned his BA at NYU and his MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He currently splits his time between Asia and the United States, developing several documentary and fiction feature projects.

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Film

The Betel Begins the Conversation

Program Affiliation

Documentary Lab

Cohort Year

2014-2015

Instagram

@baomnguyen