Rudy Valdez

Rudy Valdez is a Michigan-raised, Brooklyn-based filmmaker committed to making cinematic, meaningful documentary films about social, cultural and political issues. A 2018 Critics Choice Documentary Awards Nominee for Best New Director, Rudy got his start as a camera operator on the Peabody Award-winning, Sundance series Brick City, and other credits include: Cinematographer for Academy Award-nominated Director Sebastian Junger's film The Last Patrol (HBO); Director of Photography for Whoopi Goldberg presents Moms Mabley: I Got Something To Tell You produced and directed by Whoopi Goldberg, premiered at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival and aired on HBO; Director of Photography for Remembering the Artist, Robert De Niro, Sr., that premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival and aired on HBO; Director of Photography on The Conversation Series, a New York Times OpDoc; Cinematographer for the BET series Second Coming?: Will Black America Decide the 2012 Election?; Director of Photography for Prison Dogs, directed by Geeta Gandbhir and Perri Peltz and premiered at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival; Cinematographer for Buried Above Ground, directed by Ben Selkow and premiered at the Woodstock Film Festival; as well as, The Talk a Sam Pollard documentary for PBS. And, a true passion project, The Sentence, a documentary about mandatory minimums and sentencing reform that Valdez has shot and directed over the course of a decade, premiered and won the US Documentary Audience Award at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and was acquired by HBO.