About

I grew up watching my dad paint in his studio and listening to my mom reflect on her daily interactions with people as a therapist. The constant latent desire to follow in these divergent footsteps has made my time as a filmmaker both comfortably linear and deeply uncertain.

I discovered the camcorder at age 11 and I haven’t stopped making films since. Through my teenage years, I delved into the cinema of Hollywood but quickly found myself pulled to a broader point of view. By the end of high school, I was heavily interested in the films of Bela Tarr and Andrei Tarkovsky.

I studied Film at Emerson College where I fell in with a neurotic group of cinephiles. The experience of spending my undergraduate years in Boston bumming around with a bunch of chain-smoking, likeminded collaborators further sharpened my focus in avant-garde and art-house cinema.

I have since focused my career on film education and on taking the steps I see as necessary to becoming the best educator I can be. A school-year volunteering full time in a Philadelphia high school led me to a 12-month contract teaching English in Indonesia. That experience subsequently led me to the University of North Texas where I received my MFA in Documentary Production and Studies in 2022.

I wish to make the films I want to see, to not be beholden to market expectations or cultural conceptions of value.

I’ve spent the better part of my life time making inward-looking films. Assessing my own state of mind. At times, making explicitly diaristic work. Moving forward, I hope my films will become more and more outward-looking. I hope to access what I see as being magical in life. Relationships with others. Fraternal and sororal humanitarianism. Expanding people’s ability and proclivity to choose, to shape their own lives. Cinema still has the capacity to express these things.

-Aaron Dye