Producer
Daria Sommers is a New York-based filmmaker whose work includes both documentaries and narrative fiction. She is the co-director and co-producer of Lioness, winner of Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award at the Full Frame Film Festival in 2008 and which was broadcast nationally on the PBS series Independent Lens. Some of Daria’s previous films include Eastern Spirit Western World, which was nationally broadcast by PBS, BBC, CBC, French and Chinese Television and premiered at the Smithsonian Institution, as well as the narrative work Ready To Burn, recipient of the Panavision New Director’s Award.
She has received awards from the NEH, the NEA, The John Whitney Payson Fund, the Sundance Documentary Fund, the Fledgling Fund, Chicken & Egg Pictures, Rockefeller Family & Associates, The Open Society and NYSCA. She has been an artist-in-residence at the MacDowell Colony and Mass MoCA and served on the Metropolitan Museum’s Program for Art on Film.
Her work has screened at museums across the country including the Smithsonian’s Sackler Galleries, the Museum for Fine Arts, Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Arts Club, and the Honolulu Museum of Art as well as film festivals internationally including Tribeca, Full Frame, Human Rights Watch/London,Independent Film Festival of Boston, Jihalava in the Czech Republic and the Seven Island International Film Festival in India.
She recently served as a judge for the United Nation’s 1 in 7 BillionĀ film competition. Daria is a graduate of Oberlin College and co-founder of Room 11 Productions