Andrea Weiss, Director

Andrea Weiss is an internationally acclaimed documentary filmmaker and nonfiction author. Her books include Paris Was a Woman (Harper Collins, 1995; Counterpoint Press, 2013), which was winner of a Lambda Literary Award, Vampires And Violets (Penguin, 1993), and In The Shadow Of The Magic Mountain: The Erika And Klaus Mann Story (University of Chicago Press, 2008), which won a Publishing Triangle Award for Best Nonfiction. They have been translated into French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Korean, Swedish, Japanese, Slovenian and Croatian.

Most recently, Andrea co-directed with Greta Schiller the feature documentary The Five Demands. The film tells the little-known story of a 1969 student strike by Black and Puerto Rican students at the City College of New York that changed the face of higher education across the country. The Five Demands won the Henry Hampton Award for Excellence in Documentary Filmmaking, as well as the Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film.

Andrea is also the writer/director/editor of Bones of Contention, a feature documentary delving into the historical memory movement in Spain and the unknown story of LGBT repression under the Franco dictatorship. Bones of Contention premiered in the Berlin Film Festival, screened on the film festival circuit around the world, and had an art-house cinema release in Spain. It won several jury and audience awards, including in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Valladolid, Spain. She is also co-writer/director (with Wieland Speck) of Escape To Life, a feature documentary about the lives of Erika and Klaus Mann which premiered in the Rotterdam Film Festival followed by a wide European theatrical and television release. Her other film credits include U.N. Fever, Recall Florida, I Live At Ground Zero, Seed Of Sarah, Paris Was A Woman, A Bit Of Scarlet, Before Stonewall (for which she won an Emmy Award), International Sweethearts Of Rhythm, and Tiny & Ruby: Hell Divin’ Women.

Andrea has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and New York Foundation for the Arts as well as a U.S./Spain Fulbright Fellowship. She has been an artist in residence at Yaddo Artist Colony (New York), Banff Center for the Arts (Canada), D.A.A.D. Artist Program (Berlin), Atlantic Center for the Arts (Florida), and BigCi (Australia). She holds a Ph.D. in American History, and is Professor of Film at the City College of New York, where she co-directs the MFA Program in Film and is Founding Director of The Documentary Forum: CCNY Center for Film, Journalism and Interactive Media.


Interview with Andrea Weiss at the Teddy Awards of the Berlin Film Festival 2017.