Nico Opper (they/them) is an Emmy®-nominated director and producer who has been featured in Filmmaker Magazine’s annual “25 New Faces of Independent Film”, Indiewire Magazine’s “25 LGBT Filmmakers on the Rise”, and DOC NYC’s “40 Under 40” list of documentary talents.

Their directorial debut, Off and Running (Tribeca Film Festival Audience Favorite, POV broadcast), received nine Best Documentary awards, The WGA Award for Best Documentary Screenplay and a national Emmy nomination. Their episodic series The F Word was nominated for a Gotham Award for Breakthrough Series, an IDA Award for Best Short Form Series, and was named a top series of the year by Indiewire. Most recently they produced the ITVS feature documentary Try Harder! which premiered in the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and is currently streaming on Hulu and Independent Lens. Opper is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and a Eureka Fellowship, and serves as a Film Expert for the US State Department’s film diplomacy program, the American Film Showcase.

Opper also directed and produced When I Write It (Tribeca, Hot Docs, POV Shorts 2020) and Visitor’s Day (AFI Docs, Guadalajara Int’l Film Festival, PBS World). Additional credits include What You’ll Remember as EP (2021 New York Times Op-Doc), The Killer Within as line producer (Toronto International Film Festival, Discovery Networks, Emmy Nominee for Best Documentary), Sacco and Vanzetti as AP (First Run Features, Winner of the American Historical Association’s Film Award) and episode producer for Season Two of the documentary series, Lesbian Sex & Sexuality, for Here TV.

They are an alum of NYU Tisch School of the Arts and teach filmmaking as an assistant professor at Santa Clara University. They live in Oakland, CA with their wife, their six year old son, and a dog named Babs (short for Barbra Streisand).