Penny Lane (filmmaker)

Penny Lane (born March 6, 1978) is an American independent filmmaker. She is best known for Our Nixon (2013), which she directed and co-produced with Brian Frye. Filmmaker Magazine named Lane one of “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2012 for the films, Our Nixon and Nuts! (2016).

Lane is an assistant professor of Art and Art History at Colgate University.

Penny Lane was born in Lynn, Massachusetts. She received a BA in American Culture and Media Studies at Vassar College in 2001 and an MFA in Integrated Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2005. She has taught film, video and new media art at Bard College, Hampshire College and Williams College. She started teaching at Colgate University in 2013.

Lane became interested in filmmaking when she was working at Children’s Media Project, a nonprofit youth media center in Poughkeepsie, NY. She started to direct and produce nonfiction films in 2002. Connect is her first screened documentary. Since then, she successively made shorts, including The Abortion Diaries, and The Voyagers.

Lane met Brian Frye in 2008, and the two began to collaborate on Our Nixon, her first feature-length documentary. The all-archival documentary premiered at 42nd International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2013, winning numerous awards and nominations at Seattle International Film Festival and Ann Arbor Film Festival.

In 2016, the director’s second feature-length film Nuts! world premiered at Sundance Film Festival, and won the Special Jury Award for Editing.

Brian Frye introduced Lane to the Super 8 home movies confiscated by FBI during the Watergate investigation to her. The archival footage inspiring Lane and Frye became the basis of the 2013 released nonfiction film Our Nixon.

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