Haley Anderson

About

Haley Elizabeth Anderson is a filmmaker, writer, and visual artist from Houston, Texas. She currently attends New York University's Graduate Film Program as a Dean’s Fellow. With roots across the Gulf and a background in playwriting and poetry, her work explores coming-of-age experiences, race, and the class divide in the South and the American working class. Before moving to New York, Haley worked in casting where she street cast several feature length projects. Her experiences street casting a Terrance Malick project in Austin, Texas led her to further develop her love for working with and developing narratives with nonprofessional actors, a process that drives her work: a hybrid of narrative film and experimental documentary. 

Her recent experimental piece, PRESENCE, recently played at the closing event held for the first large-scale Jean Michel Basquiat exhibition in the UK,  Basquiat: Boom for Real. Her short film, GET OUT FAST, premiered at the 2017 Slamdance Film Festival where she was named a filmmaker to watch. 

A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, she is currently developing two feature films: COYOTE BOYS, a feature length narrative inspired by her short GET OUT FAST; and GULF, a non-linear experimental feature that explores transgenerational trauma and genetic memory through coming of age experiences of her female relatives across three generations as they live in the American South. Her thesis film, PILLARS is a sequence from GULF. GULF is currently a finalist project for the Sloan Feature Film Award and recently awarded a Sloan Screenwriting Development Grant. Haley was just selected as a Sundance Institute Screenwriting Intensive Fellow and for the TFI All Access Program for COYOTE BOYS. 

Haley is commissioned to produce GULF TONES, a photography and three channel film installation at the Shed in New York that will run through Summer 2019. GULF TONES weaves together interviews, auditions, and quotidian moments captured from various camera tests, street casting sessions, and research/photography trips for COYOTE BOYS and GULF. 

She is currently filming a documentary about the homeless experience of teenage girls in New York City entitled IF THERE IS LIGHT. The project is sponsored by Tribeca Studios, Proctor&Gamble, and Queen Latifah within the Queen’s Collective and will premiere at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival. The film will be available on Hulu summer 2019. 

Haley also recently received the Davey Foundation’s 2018 production grant, the 2018 Flies Collective Grant, the 2018 Eyeslicer’s Radical Filmmaking Fund Grant, and the Spike Lee/ Sandra Ifraimova Film Production Award for her thesis PILLARS. 

Her fourth narrative short film, SUMMER ANIMALS, which was made with generous support from Kodak, is currently in post-production. Haley’s work has been featured in The New Orleans Film Festival, Lone Star Film Festival, I-D Magazine, Cultured Magazine, No Budge, Vimeo, and the Barbican in London.