Penny Lane has been making award-winning documentaries and essay films since 2002.

Her first feature documentary, OUR NIXON, world premiered in 2013 at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, had its North American premiere at SXSW, and was selected as the Closing Night Film at New Directors/New Films. OUR NIXON went on to win awards at film festivals such as Seattle, Nantucket, Ann Arbor, Traverse City and IFFB, before being jointly released by Cinedigm and CNN Films. OUR NIXON was nominated for the Gotham Awards (“Best Documentary”) and Cinema Eye Honors (“Best Editing”).

Penny is a Creative Capital grantee and was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2012. She has been awarded grants for her work by Cinereach, Tribeca Film Institute Documentary Fund, LEF Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, Adrienne Shelly Foundation, Experimental Television Center, IFP and the Puffin Foundation. She was named “Most Badass!” at the Iowa City Documentary Film Festival in 2009.

Her short experimental films, such as THE VOYAGERS (2010), THE COMMONERS (2009), SHE USED TO SEE HIM MOST WEEKENDS (2007) and WE ARE THE LITTLETONS (2004), have screened and won accolades at film festivals such as Rotterdam, Images, IMPAKT, FLEX FEST, Citizen Jane, New Orleans Film Festival, AFI FEST and Rooftop Films. Her short documentary THE ABORTION DIARIES (2005) has become an important organizing and educational tool across the nation. THE ABORTION DIARIES has screened in 42 states & worldwide at over 350 different community venues, ranging from bars to art centers to clinics to colleges, and also on Yes! Television and Free Speech TV.

Penny Lane’s newest film NUTS! premiered in competition at Sundance this January, winning Lane the Special Jury Award for Editing. NUTS! is a feature length documentary about Dr. John Romulus Brinkley, an eccentric genius who built an empire in Depression-era America with a goat testicle impotence cure and a million watt radio station. The film opens in select cities across the country this summer, beginning June 22 at Film Forum (NYC).

She has taught film, video and new media arts at Bard College, Hampshire College and Williams College, and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Colgate University.

And yes, Penny Lane is her real name!

Winning Project: OUR NIXON

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OUR NIXON (2013)

Film website: http:// www.ournixon.com

Link to trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odTZDplswDg

Throughout Richard Nixon’s presidency, three of his top White House aides obsessively documented their experiences with Super 8 home movie cameras. Young, idealistic and dedicated, they had no idea that a few years later they’d all be in prison. This unique and personal visual record, created by H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and Dwight Chapin, was seized by the FBI during the Watergate investigation, then filed away at the National Archives, and forgotten for almost 40 years. OUR NIXON is an all-archival documentary presenting those home movies for the first time, along with other rare footage, creating an intimate and complex portrait of the Nixon presidency as never seen before.