Kelly Daniela Norris is a Mexican-American film director, screenwriter, and producer. Her feature directorial debut Sombras de Azul [1] [2] was shot on-location in Cuba and premiered at the Austin Film Festival in 2013, winning the Texas Independents Audience Award. [3] Her second feature, Nakom , co-directed alongside her collaborator T.W. Pittman, and was shot in the Upper East Region of Ghana. [4] Nakom had its world premiere at the 66th Berlin International Film Festival in the Panorama section 2016, was selected for the prestigious New Directors/New Films, [5] [6] was nominated for an Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award for Best Picture made for under $500,000, [7] and had a limited theatrical release in NYC in March 2017. [8] [9] In 2016, Kelly Daniela Norris and T.W. Pittman were selected for Filmmaker Magazine's “25 New Faces of Filmmaking." [10]
Kelly Daniela Norris's mother, Catalina Blackaller, was born in Chihuahua, Mexico and her father, Dr. Ronald Norris, a chiropractor, was born in Tennessee, and they met in Los Angeles. Norris cited her late brother and father as inspirations for her love of cinema, which was cultivated at a very young age. [2] In the 1990s, her father acquired a local video shop's library from a friend in Vista, CA when the shop needed to switch its inventory over from Betamax to VHS. He afterward converted a section of the garage into a makeshift video library, bought a Betamax player, and taught his 5-year-old daughter how to use it. [11] [12] [13]
Norris graduated magna cum laude from Columbia University with a double major in Film Studies and Psychology, and departmental honors in film. [14] Her honors thesis was entitled, "In Search of the Tea Philosopher within the Cinematic Essayist: Chris Marker's Sans Soleil " advised under Richard Peña [15] which "deconstructed the essay-film genre using Phillip Lopate’s criteria alongside the writings of Kazou Okakura". [15] [16] In 2014, she entered a PhD program in the Film and Media Department at University of California Berkeley [17] and taught courses on avant-garde cinema, film history, and digital film production [18] before receiving an award for Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor in 2017-2018. [19]
In 2019, Norris gave a talk at the Austin Film Society Cinema on her archival research on stuntwomen from the 1910s, focusing on Helen Holmes of The Hazards of Helen , discussing how the use of fantastical, death-defying female bodies in these early silent serials served to promote and reinforce a new vision of a woman, falling in line with the momentum of First Wave Feminism and the Suffragette Movement of the era. [20]
| Year | Film | Role | Awards |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | Nakom (feature) | Co-Director, Producer |
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| 2013 | Sombras de Azul (feature) | Director, Writer, Co-Producer |
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| 2009 | Sinnerman (short) | Co-Director, Producer |
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