WHO’S VANESSA?
Vanessa Reiser is a documentary filmmaker based in Austin, Texas.
She grew up in a family who shared time between Houston, Texas and rural New Hampshire, which was a foundational experience of crossing between worlds that instilled in her an abiding curiosity about people.
In 1995 she moved to New York City, where she later earned a BFA in Film and Television from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Film school in the late 1990’s was all analog, and learning to shoot on 16mm film and edit on a Steenbeck editing console taught her the foundational craft of filmmaking. There’s something about slicing into film with a raw razor blade that gives one pause before making an edit! It was at NYU where a documentary class with the legendary filmmaker George Stoney provided focus to the rest of her career. It became clear that true stories told with patience, honesty and care were the ones that moved her most.
After college, Vanessa spent 3 years working for the Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist Eddie Adams, producing his legendary annual photojournalism workshop in Jeffersonville, New York. Hearing stories of documenting war zones, refugee camps, rock stars, and Fidel Castro helped to inspire her to tell stories of people, ranging from the fascinating to the unseen and overlooked.
Her career began in the editing room, and that foundation and instinct for rhythm continues to inform her choices behind the camera. She often works as her own cinematographer and editor, keeping her sets deliberately small and intimate. It's an approach that creates space for her subjects to be fully and honestly themselves.
For over more than two decades, her work has taken her into classrooms and concert halls, artists' studios and living rooms, and into the lives of children waiting to be chosen by a family. Her films have been presented by Austin PBS, and her clients have included the University of Texas at Austin, the Austin Ed Fund, the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, and Heart Gallery NYC — institutions whose work, like her own, is rooted in the belief that people and their stories matter.
