Rodney Evans is an award-winning fiction and documentary film writer, director and producer. His debut feature Brother to Brother won the Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Prize in Drama. The film had its European premiere at The Berlin International Film Festival and garnered four Independent Spirit Award nominations including Best First Film, Best First Screenplay and Best Debut Performance for Anthony Mackie. Evans has received funding from The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, The Ford Foundation's JustFilms Program, The Creative Capital Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, The NY State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), The Independent Television Service (ITVS) and Black Public Media (BPM). His second fiction feature, The Happy Sad, played at over thirty film festivals throughout the world and had its U.S. theatrical premiere at the IFC Center in NYC and the Sundance Sunset Cinema in Los Angeles. Evans has taught at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, Princeton, Cooper Union and the MFA Video Program at the School of Visual Arts. His latest feature documentary, Visions Portraits, celebrated its World Premiere at the 2019 SXSW Film Festival in the Documentary Feature Competition and debuted internationally at BFI Flare: London LGBTQ+ Film Festival. Vision Portraits won the Award for Best Documentary at Frameline-The San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival in 2019 and the Award for Artistic Achievement at Outfest 2019. It played theatrically in major U.S. cities from August to October 2019. Rodney was recently honored with the 2019 Frameline Award for Career Achievement and is a 2020 Sundance Institute Momentum Fellow. Evans has been teaching Screenwriting and all FMST production courses at Swarthmore since 2015. Evans is an NEH/Firelight Media Spark Fund Recipient for 2022/23 and a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.