Gaspar González

Documentary filmmaker Gaspar González was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, and grew up in Miami. The son of Cuban immigrants, he is a graduate of the University of Florida and Yale University. His first film as director/producer was the national PBS release Muhammad Ali: Made in Miami (2008), which Sports Illustrated deemed a surprisingly fresh take on the Ali saga. He has since returned to the intersection of sport and culture with the ESPN 30 for 30 Short The Guerrilla Fighter (2016), A Long Way from Home: The Untold Story of Baseball's Desegregation (2018), and the SEC Storied (2011) entry The All-American Cuban Comet. His other films include the award-winning Havana House (2017) and Errol Flynn's Ghost: Hollywood in Havana (2018), both filmed on location in Cuba. In 2014, he founded Hammer and Nail Productions. The company's first release was the Grantland short doc Gay Talese's Address Book (2015), which garnered mentions in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Paris Review. In March 2015, González was a recipient of the prestigious Media Projects Production Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, one of only four awarded that cycle. Other grant recipients that year included projects by Ken Burns and Sam Pollard. A frequent guest at film festivals and conferences, in 2017 he was a featured speaker at AFI Docs. In 2018, he was named a Poynter Fellow in Journalism at Yale, a residency program for distinguished media professionals. Previous Poynter Fellowship alumni include Academy Award winners Peter Davis, Ezra Edelman, and Alex Gibney. His films have screened at festivals around the world, as well as at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, Pérez Art Museum Miami, and Dodger Stadium. He lives in Miami with his wife, author Christina Lane, and their son.