About

Daria Sommers is a director, writer and producer whose work includes both fiction and non-fiction. Her multiple award-winning films include the feature-length documentary Lioness, winner of Duke’s Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award at the Full Frame Film Festival, the half-hour 35 mm drama Ready to Burn, winner of Panavision’s New Director Award and Three Trembling Cities, a web series on immigrants in New York City, winner of Best Drama at UK WebFest and Philly TV Fest.

Daria's work has garnered support from the NEH, the NEA, the Sundance Documentary Fund, the Fledgling Fund, Chicken and Egg Pictures, NYSCA and the John Whitney Payson Fund among many others. She has written extensively on arts and culture for multiple publications and been an artist-in-residence at the MacDowell Colony and Mass MoCA, served on the Metropolitan Museum's Program for Art on Film and the UN's One In A Billion Film Series.

Her work has been screened at museums around the world including the Smithsonian Institution, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Honolulu Museum, and broadcast internationally on PBS, BBC, CBC, France and China. Daria is a graduate of Oberlin College.

Selected Awards Sundance Documentary Award, Chicken & Egg Pictures, Panavision New Director’s Award, Full Frame Film Festival Duke Documentary Award, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council for the Arts, MacDowell Arts Colony Fellowship Filmmaking, Mass MoCA Fellowship Outreach and Engagement, Rockefeller Family & Associates Fund, Open Society, Best Drama UK Webfest, Best Drama Philadelphia Webfest, Best Short Nassau County Film Festival Award, Vietnam Veterans Documentary Film Award.

Selected Film Festivals and Screenings Tribeca Film Festival, Boston Independent Film Festival, Human Rights Watch Film Festival, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Boston Independent Film Festival, Nassau County Film Festival, The Art of Brooklyn Film Festival, Santa Cruz Film Festival, Asheville Film Festival, Margaret Meade Film Festival, Jihlava International Documentary, Valencia Film Festival of Human Rights, Little Rock Film Festival, The Brooklyn Webfest, UK Webfest, Philly Webfest, Minnesota Webfest, StareableFest, Kew Gardens Webfest, HollyWeb Festival, Roma WebFest, NOT NORMAL: Artists in Resistance in the Age of Trump.