Bao Nguyen

Bao Nguyen is an award-winning director, cinematographer and producer. Nguyen has enjoyed a close relationship with the Tribeca Film Festival and Tribeca Film Institute that preceded presentation of Live From New York! as the Opening Night film at the Festival. He produced and shot Jonathan Kalafer's Once in a Lullaby, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2012. A documentary about the importance of arts education through the story of the PS22 chorus and their performance at the 86th Academy Awards, the film won the Audience Award at the Woodstock Film Festival, and was nominated for a Gotham Independent Film Award.

He also was Director of Photography for the Vietnam unit for David Holbrooke's The Diplomat, which had its World Premiere at Tribeca Film Festival. In addition, two of Nguyen's projects received grant money from the Tribeca Film Institute. The first, 2030 (original title Nuoc), which he produced and shot, was awarded the Sloan Filmmaker Award. The film is a near-future thriller set in Vietnam in 2030 after global warming has affected southern Vietnam. Directed by Nguyen-Võ Nghiêm-Minh, it was the opening night selection of the Panorama section at the 2014 Berlin International Film Festival.

The second, In the Shadow of the Hills, which he was directing, has received funding from the Tribeca All-Access program and ITVS. The film is a portrait of the remote rural communities of Sapa, Vietnam from the perspective of two young Hmong women. Nguyen has been filming the women yearly since 2010, when one was 17 and the other was 26, and continued through their adult lives. Nguyen is also in the early stages of co-directing with Xuan Duong the Sundance-supported The Betel Beginds the Conversation, about the Vietnamese LGBT community and the pending Same Sex Marriage legislation. Nguyen co-produced and shot Sasha Friedlander's Where Heaven Meets Hell, a feature documentary about impoverished sulfur miners in Indonesia, which premiered on PBS in 2013 as the opening film for their Global Voices program.

Nguyen, whose parents immigrated to the US after fleeing the Vietnam War, was born in Takoma Park, Maryland, near Washington, DC. Growing up near the nation's capitol, he became interested in politics early on and got his BA in Politics/International Relations at NYU. Always interested in artistic pursuits, he took some undergraduate film courses while at NYU, and began pursuing film, first as a hobby, and eventually as a vocation. While working on the Obama campaign, he co-directed with Adele Pham the short Motoo, about a visiting professor from Japan who knocked on over a thousand doors during the course of the campaign.

In 2010, Nguyen entered the School of Visual Art's inaugural MFA Social Documentary Film program. During that time he shot on eleven of his classmates' thesis films, including Hanzhang Shen's Why Am I Still Alive, which was a finalist for a Student Academy Award. His own thesis film, Julian, was a 40-minute documentary about Lance Corporal Julian Brennan, the first combat death in Afghanistan during the Obama presidency. Julian won a CINE Golden Eagle Award, the Best Student Documentary Short at the Palm Springs ShortsFest, the Special Jury Prize at DOCNYC, and was nominated for an IDA Award. His subsequent work has been seen in numerous festivals and museums, including MoMA, PS1, and the Smithsonian, as well as in the New York Times, Al Jazeera, HBO, ARTE, PBS and Rolling Stone, among others.

While pursuing his personal directing and producing projects, Nguyen also took many jobs as a cinematographer, including: Saigon Electric, a narrative feature set in the Vietnamese hip-hop world, Mr. Cao Goes To Washington (about the first Vietnamese-American congressman), and the shorts Monk by Blood, and Memory/Loss. He was the cinematographer on Code Red: China's Cyber Civil War. Nguyen divides his time between New York City and Vietnam.

Tribeca Film