Margaret Brown (film director)


Margaret Luce Brown is an American film director.

Early life

Brown was born and raised in Mobile, Alabama. A Murphy High School alumna, she earned her BA from Brown University with concentrations in Creative Writing and Modern Culture and Media, and her MFA in Film from New York University. She was cinematographer for 99 Threadwaxing in 1999 and director for Ice Fishing in 2000.

Career

Brown's full-length debut was Be Here To Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt which chronicles the turbulent life of American singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt. Time Out magazine listed it at number 7 on its "50 Greatest Music Films Ever".
Brown subsequently directed the feature documentary The Order of Myths a 2008 Sundance Film Festival selection about the segregated Mardi Gras celebration of Mobile, Alabama. The film was nominated for Independent Spirit Award. It won many awards including a Peabody Award, a Cinematic Vision Award at the Silverdocs Documentary Festival and Truer Than Fiction Award at the Independent Spirit Awards.
In 2014, she directed the feature documentary The Great Invisible which won the SXSW Grand Jury Prize for Documentary and received an Emmy nomination for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking and aired on Independent Lens on PBS on April 2015. The Great Invisible features the BP oil spill in the Gulf in 2010 and Deepwater Horizon oil spill aftermath.

Honors and awards

Brown was nominated a Cultural Ambassador for Documentary Filmmaking from the United States to Colombia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan and holds fellowships from United States Artists and The MacDowell Colony.