Nico Opper

Nico Opper (they/them) is an Emmy®-nominated director and producer who has been featured in Filmmaker Magazine’s annual “25 New Faces of Independent Film”, Indiewire Magazine’s “25 LGBT Filmmakers on the Rise”, DOC NYC’s “40 Under 40” list of documentary talents, and most recently, received a 2024 Chicken & Egg Pictures Award. Their directorial debut, Off and Running (Tribeca Film Festival Audience Favorite, POV broadcast), received nine Best Documentary awards, The WGA Award for Best Documentary Screenplay and a national Emmy nomination. Their episodic series The F Word was nominated for a Gotham Award for Breakthrough Series, an IDA Award for Best Short Form Series, and was named a top series of the year by Indiewire. They produced the ITVS feature documentary Try Harder! which premiered in the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and is currently streaming on Hulu and Independent Lens. Opper is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and a Eureka Fellowship, and serves as a Film Expert for the US State Department’s film diplomacy program, the American Film Showcase. Opper also directed and produced When I Write It (Tribeca, Hot Docs, POV Shorts 2020) and Visitor’s Day (AFI Docs, Guadalajara Int’l Film Festival, PBS World). Executive Producer credits include Breaking the News (Tribeca Film Festival, Independent Lens), What You’ll Remember (New York Times Op-Doc), and the forthcoming ITVS doc, Flood. Opper is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and a Eureka Fellowship, and an alum of NYU Tisch School of the Arts. They are an associate professor at Santa Clara University and serve as a mentor for various organizations including Sundance Institute and The Logan Nonfiction Program They live in Oakland, CA with their wife and son.