Ross McElwee

biography

Ross McElwee is a documentary filmmaker from Charlotte, North Carolina currently living in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

McElwee has made ten feature-length films. Sherman’s March won Best Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival and was chosen for preservation by the U.S Library of Congress National Film Registry in 2000 as a “historically signiﬁcant American motion picture.”

Bright Leaves premiered at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight. McElwee's In Paraguay premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2008, and he returned to Venice in 2011 to premiere Photographic Memory. His films have been extensively written about in the US and European press.

In 2005, complete retrospectives of McElwee’s films were presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and later in Brussels, Milan, Lisbon, Moscow, New Zealand, Seoul, Quito, Riga, Latvia and Nyon, Switzerland.

Four of his films were featured in a selection of western documentarie shown for the first time in Tehran, and in 2015, McElwee presented his films in Changchun, Guangzhou, and Beijing, China. In 2018, Documenta Madrid held a complete retrospective of McElwee’s films. In 2019, a complete retrospective was presented in Paris at Centre Pompidou.

McElwee has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the American Film Institute. He has twice been awarded fellowships in filmmaking by the National Endowment for the Arts and production grants from the LEF foundation.

McElwee received the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival’s Career Award in 2007 and the Pennebaker Award for his career in 2023.

McElwee studied under novelist John Hawkes at Brown University, but his interest in photography and film began with cross registered courses taken at Rhode Island School of Design. After graduating from Brown in 1971, he received his MS from MIT, studying under documentarians Richard Leacock and Ed Pincus.

McElwee was Professor of the Practice of Filmmaking in the Department of Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard beginning in 2003 until his retirement in 2024. He is now a Research Professor, Emeritus in the AFVS Department.