Michael Almereyda
Visiting Filmmaker
Profile
Michael Almereyda is an American film director, screenwriter, and film producer. His work includes features, documentaries, and shorts.
Almereyda’s most well-known movie, HAMLET (2000), an adaptation layering a contemporary New York setting on Shakespeare’s text, was shot on Super 16mm, and featured Ethan Hawke, Bill Murray, Kyle MacLachlan, Julia Stiles, Liev Schreiber and Sam Shepard.
Almereyda directed two features set in New Orleans, pre-Katrina and post-Katrina: HAPPY HERE AND NOW (2002) and NEW ORLEANS, MON AMOUR (2008).
He has won countless honors and awards, including: a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, a nomination for a Gotham Award for Best Documentary from the Independent Filmmaker Project for his films WILLIAM EGGLESTON IN THE REAL WORLD (2005) and PARADISE (2009); an award for Best Non-Fiction Short at Sundance in 2013 and Best Documentary at the Ann Arbor Film for the film SKINNINGROVE, profiling photographer Chris KillipIn. In 2015, Almereyda received the Moving Image Creative Capital Award. Additionally, his writing has appeared in Film Comment, Artforum, the New York Times, and booklets for the Criterion Collection.
Almereyda’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s CYMBELINE premiered at the 2014 Venice Film Festival. EXPERIMENTER, a bio-pic focusing on Stanley Milgram’s controversial obedience experiments, premiered at Sundance in 2015. Most recently, Almereyda’s film MARJORIE PRIME, premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival and was awarded the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize.