Todd Chandler

Todd Chandler is a filmmaker, artist, and educator whose work explores American rituals, landscapes, and systems of power. His most recent documentary, Bulletproof (2020), screened at over two dozen festivals worldwide, and was called "dreamlike and startling," by the New York Times and "a quiet gut punch of a film," by the Guardian. His films and installations have been featured at True/False, IDFA, Doclisboa, the Hammer Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and Mass MoCA. His work has been supported by Creative Capital, Field of Vision, Sundance Institute, International Documentary Association, Doc Society, and ITVS, among others. He was one of Filmmaker Magazine's 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2019, a fellow at the Sundance Non-Fiction Director's Residency, and a Points North Fellow. In 2020 he received the Hot Docs International Emerging Filmmaker award for Bulletproof. He is also an accomplished film editor. He was the lead editor and a human rights video advocacy trainer at WITNESS, edited the Academy Award nominated documentary short film In the Absence (2018), directed by Seung-jun Yi, and Reid Davenport's feature documentary I Didn't See You There (2022), which won Davenport the U.S. Documentary Directing Award at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. As an artist he often works collaboratively. He has created drive-in theaters from salvaged materials, floated down the Mississippi and Hudson rivers on massive sculptural rafts, and organized multi-day music festivals in the wilds of Pennsylvania. He is the co-creator of the large-scale installation Empire Drive-In, and a founding member of the art-raft collective The Miss Rockaway Armada and the band Dark Dark Dark. He has taught filmmaking in institutional and non-institutional contexts, including in high schools and universities, community-based organizations. He teaches in the Film Department at Brooklyn College.