Vera Brunner-Sung is a filmmaker who works across experimental, documentary, and narrative to explore connections between place and identity.
Her work has been presented at festivals, museums, and galleries in the U.S. and abroad, including Sundance, the Torino Film Festival, CPH:DOX, Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, MoMA PS1, San Francisco International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Images Festival. Her first feature, Bella Vista, had its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2014 (Bright Future), and went on to win her the George C. Lin Emerging Filmmaker Award at the 15th San Diego Asian Film Festival. Her award-winning sophomore feature Bitterroot (Nonetheless/Spark Features/Louverture Films) premiered in the US Narrative Competition at the 2024 Tribeca Festival, receiving a Special Jury Mention for its cinematography. Vera’s work has been supported by SFFILM, the Wexner Center for the Arts, The Gotham, the National Park Service, and others. She is a 2015 Center for Asian American Media Fellow, a 2020 Sundance FilmTwo Fellow, and a 2022 Sundance Institute Asian American Fellow.
In addition to making films, Vera is a writer and educator. Her essays, reviews, and reports have appeared in 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 film appears in Documenting the Visual Arts (ed. Roger Hallas, Routledge, 2019). She is an associate professor in the Department of Radio/Televison/Film at Northwestern University.