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Department ofCommunication

Nico Opper

Nico Opper

Assistant Professor

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”, and DOC NYC’s “40 Under 40” list of documentary talents. Their directorial debut, Off and Running (Tribeca Film Festival Audience Favorite, P.O.V. broadcast), received the Best Documentary Award at Outfest, The WGA Award for Best Documentary Screenplay and a national Emmy nomination. Their episodic series The F Word (Los Angeles Film Festival, PBS Digital Studios, SoulPancake) 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. Most recently they produced the ITVS feature documentary Try Harder! which premiered in the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. 

Other films as director/producer include Visitor’s Day (AFI Docs, Guadalajara Int’l Film Festival, PBS DocWorld) and their short doc with Shannon St. Aubin, When I Write It (Tribeca, Hot Docs, P.O.V.). Opper is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and a Eureka Fellowship, the largest unrestricted grant awarded to a Bay Area artist. They are a graduate of NYU Film School, and their work is supported by the Tribeca Film Institute, Chicken and Egg Pictures, Film Independent, IFP and ITVS, among others. They regularly mentor LGBTQ scholars as an alum of the Point Foundation, and they live in Oakland with their wife and son.

In the News

October 8, 2020

Nico Opper (Communication) and their project were chosen by Film Independent for its inaugural Docuseries Intensive.

December 16, 2019

Nico Opper (Communication) was chosen by the Fleishhacker Foundation to receive the Eureka Fellowship, awarded to only a handful of Bay Area visual artists.

September 2019

Nico Opper was named by DOC NYC as one of the country’s top “40 under 40”  filmmakers.