A writer and director who often edits her own projects, Vera Brunner-Sung works across experimental, narrative, and documentary to explore American identity and belonging.
Her short films have screened at Sundance, MoMA PS1, CPH:DOX, Images Festival, Torino, San Francisco International, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, among others. BELLA VISTA, her 2014 narrative feature debut, premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (Bright Future) and was nominated for FilmFest Hamburg’s Friedrich Ebert Political Film Prize; it was distributed via streaming, satellite television, and a grant-funded tour of communities across the state of Montana. Her feature documentary co-directed with Valerie Stadler, FALLEN STAR: FINDING HOME (2016), screened at the Whitney Museum and MOCA Los Angeles. CHARACTER, her 2020 portrait of actor Mark Metcalf, is a Vimeo Staff Pick and is distributed online via The New Yorker. Brunner-Sung’s latest feature, BITTERROOT (Nonetheless/Spark Features/Louverture Films), was made in close partnership with members of the Hmong community in Missoula, Montana. It premiered in the 2024 U.S. Narrative Competition at Tribeca, receiving a special jury mention for its cinematography.
Brunner-Sung is the recipient of two Sundance Institute fellowships and a fellowship from the Center for Asian American Media. Her work has been supported by SFFILM, the Wexner Center for the Arts, The Gotham, the National Park Service, and others. She has also written about film for print and online publications including Sight & Sound, Cinema Scope, and Millennium Film Journal. Her chapter on the representation of site-specific art in contemporary documentary appears in Documenting the Visual Arts (ed. Roger Hallas, Routledge, 2019). She has curated programs for festivals and other venues and was a programming associate with the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival for eight years.
Education
MFA, Film and Video, California Institute of the Arts, 2008
BA, Public Policy and American Institutions/Visual Art, Brown University, 2001