Reid Davenport makes documentaries about disability from an overtly political perspective. His first feature film, I DIDN’T SEE YOU THERE, won the Directing Award for U.S. Documentary at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and the McBaine Bay Area Documentary Award at San Francisco IFF. It will have a national broadcast on POV in January 2023.
The film has been hailed by critics as “first-person poetry in captivating motion, expressed with a singular, assured artistic voice” and a “must-see.” In 2020, Reid was named to DOC NYC’s “40 Filmmakers Under 40.” His short film, A CEREBRAL GAME, won the Artistic Vision Award at the 2016 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival for “creating a visual landscape that is at once disorienting and nostalgic - and the result is so raw and compelling it's impossible to turn away.” Along with A CEREBRAL GAME, his short documentaries WHEELCHAIR DIARIES and RAMPED UP are distributed by New Day Films. Reid’s work has been supported by Ford Foundation, Sundance Institute, Creative Capital, XTR, ITVS, NBCUniversal, CNN and Points North Institute, among others.
Reid was a 2017 TED fellow and gave a TED Talk about incorporating his own literal body into his filmmaking. His work has been featured by outlets like NPR, PBS, The Washington Post, MSNBC, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Reid holds an MFA in Documentary Film & Video from Stanford University and a BA in Journalism and Mass Communication from The George Washington University.
