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Rhys Ernst
he/him

Black-and-white photo of Rhys Ernst gazing contemplatively off to the bottom left. He has short dark hair and a small mustache. He wears a dark long sleeve jacket with black headphones resting around his neck, which provides an aesthetic contrast to the plain light wall and light musical equipment. In the bottom right corner of the image, a sliver of another person's face can be seen. This person has dark skin, glasses, and wears a baseball cap which juts out a little farther into frame.

Places of practice

Amherst, Massachusetts, United States of America

Santa Clarita, California, United States of America

Los Angeles, California, United States of America

New York City, New York, United States of America

Years active

2003

Images
Black-and-white photo of Rhys Ernst gazing contemplatively off to the bottom left. He has short dark hair and a small mustache. He wears a dark long sleeve jacket with black headphones resting around his neck, which provides an aesthetic contrast to the plain light wall and light musical equipment. In the bottom right corner of the image, a sliver of another person's face can be seen. This person has dark skin, glasses, and wears a baseball cap which juts out a little farther into frame.
Metadata
Biography

Rhys Ernst is a filmmaker and an artist based in Los Angeles. His debut feature film ADAM, produced by James Schamus and starring Emmy and Golden Globe-nominee Margaret Qualley, premiered as an official selection of the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, won awards at Outfest, Oslo Fusion, and the Mezipatra Film Festival, and was nominated for a 2020 GLAAD award. He was a Producer and Director on Amazon’s Transparent and created the title sequence for the series. He was nominated for a 2015 Emmy Award for directing and producing Amazon’s webseries This Is Me. As a commercial director, he is repped by Radical Media and his clients have included Google and Facebook. Ernst has shown work at the Whitney Biennial, the Sundance Film Festival, Oberhausen, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, The Walker and The Hammer Museums; he has won two Special Recognition GLAAD Awards as well as awards at Outfest, Chicago International Film Festival, the L.A. and the Seattle Transgender Film Festivals, and he is on the Board of Directors of Film Independent. He received a BA from Hampshire College and an MFA from CalArts.

Information contributed by the artist to the TMP

Rhys Ernst is a filmmaker and artist. He was a Producer and Director on Amazon’s Transparent and created the title sequence for the series. He was nominated for a 2015 Emmy Award for directing and producing the webseries Transparent: This Is Me, which won a Special Recognition GLAAD Award. In 2016 he teamed up with Focus Features to create the online series, We’ve Been Around. In addition to the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Ernst has shown work at Sundance, Oberhausen, and The Hammer Museum; he has won awards at Outfest, Chicago International Film Festival and the LA Transgender Film Festival; and he was a Point Scholar, a Project Involve Fellow, and was awarded with the 2015 Point Foundation Horizon Award and the ACLU Liberty Award for his work on transgender representation in the media. He received a BA from Hampshire College and an MFA from CalArts.

YBCA. “Rhys Ernst,” n.d. https://ybca.org/artist/rhys-ernst/.

Rhys Ernst is a writer/director who positions his filmmaking in a "New Trans Cinema" that complicates gender representation in narrative cinema and places queer and transgender characters within larger narratives. Ernst received his MFA in Film/ Video at CalArts in 2011 and a BA from Hampshire College in 2004. His MFA thesis filmThe Thing" premiered at Sundance 2012 and his new film "She Gone Rogue" premiered at the 2012 Made in LA Los Angeles Biennial at the Hammer Museum. Past screening venues include Oberhausen, Chicago International FF, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and in Los Angeles at UCLA Hammer Museum, REDCAT, and LACE. He was named 2010 HBO Point Scholar, a 2012 Project: Involve Fellow, he received a 2003 Princess Grace Award Honorarium and a Gold Plaque at the 2003 Chicago International Film Festival, and was President of the Jury at Izmir Short film festival in Turkey. He is currently directing a 35mm short adaptation of the life of transgender pioneer Vicki Marlene. He lives in Los Angeles.

CFMDC. “Rhys Ernst,” n.d. https://www.cfmdc.org/filmmaker/6533.
Filmography
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    She Gone Rogue

    film/video, 2012

    Director, Writer/Screenwriter/Story, Producer