Sydney Freeland
Sydney Freeland is a Native American filmmaker. She is a citizen of the Navajo Nation.
She wrote and directed the film Drunktown's Finest, which garnered numerous acclaims after premiering at the Sundance Film Festival. Her second film, Deidra & Laney Rob a Train, debuted at Sundance and was released on Netflix in 2017; her third, Rez Ball, released in 2024.
Early life
Freeland was born in Gallup, New Mexico, in 1980 to a Navajo father and a Scottish mother, and she was raised on a Navajo Reservation. Freeland attended Academy of Art University in San Francisco and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in computer animation and a Master of Fine Arts in film. She is a 2004 Fulbright scholar, who focused her scholarship on a field study of Indigenous peoples in Ecuador. Freeland received a 2007 Disney Scholarship and was a 2008 Disney Fellowship semifinalist. Freeland is also a 2009 Sundance Institute Native Lab fellow.Career
Prior to making her first feature-length film, Drunktown's Finest, Freeland previously worked as a production assistant, as a writer and as a camera intern. Freeland worked for a number of different media companies, including The Food Network, Walt Disney, Comedy Central, and National Geographic.Freeland directed a six-minute short, Hoverboard, utilizing Kickstarter to help fund the short. The film was inspired by Back to the Future Part II. Drunktown's Finest is her second venture into filmmaking. The 95-minute-long film is a coming-of-age story about the complex issues surrounding identity and the struggles faced by Native American people. The film's name is inspired by a controversial 20/20 segment on ABC News, which branded the town of Gallup, New Mexico as "Drunk Town, USA", after the increase of instances of alcoholism on the border of the Navajo Nation. Freeland wrote and directed Drunktown's Finest as a way to combat negative stereotypes of her home community. Freeland, who is herself a transgender woman, also directed a digital series about queer and trans women called Her Story. The series was nominated for the newly created Emmy Award category of Outstanding Short Form Comedy or Drama.
In 2014 Freeland was named a United States Artists Fellow.
On March 19, 2022, Freeland joined as a director for the upcoming superhero streaming series Echo for Disney+. In 2022, she was included in the Fast Company Queer 50 list.
Filmography
- 2008: The Migration - director
- 2012: Hoverboard - producer, writer, director
- 2014: Drunktown's Finest - screenwriter, director
- 2016: Her Story - director
- 2017: Deidra & Laney Rob a Train - director
- 2018–2019: Grey's Anatomy - director
- 2018: Heathers - director
- 2019: Station 19 - director
- 2019: Chambers - director
- 2019: Tales of the City - director
- 2019: Fear the Walking Dead - director
- 2019: Impulse - director
- 2019: Emergence - director
- 2020: Nancy Drew - director
- 2020: P-Valley - director
- 2020: The Wilds - director
- 2021: Rutherford Falls - director
- 2021: Reservation Dogs - director
- 2022: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - director
- 2024: Echo - executive producer, director
- 2024: Rez Ball - screenwriter, director