DIRECTORS

Allison Otto is an Emmy-winning filmmaker whose first feature film, The Thief Collector, was a documentary/narrative hybrid that premiered at the 2022 South by Southwest Film Festival. The film was nominated for two Critics Choice Awards in 2023. Variety magazine hailed The Thief Collector as “a nimble and entertaining dissection of a crime” and a film “that builds to a supreme moment of ‘Oh. My. God.’” Additional festival screenings included the Palm Springs International Film Festival, Hot Docs, the SFFILM festival, Hot Springs, the Woods Hole Film Festival, and Telluride Mountainfilm. The Thief Collector is streaming on Amazon. Allison’s documentary short, The Love Bugs (2019), was awarded Outstanding Short Documentary in the 42nd Annual News & Documentary Emmy Awards after screening on POV Shorts Season 3 (2020). The film was also shortlisted for a 2019 International Documentary Association Award and was longlisted for an Oscar in the Documentary Short category. Allison is also a 2019 recipient of the SFFILM Catapult Film Fellowship, a 2018 and 2011 Telluride Mountainfilm Commitment grant recipient, and a 2018 Roy W. Dean grant winner. Her journalism clients have included National Geographic, BBC America, NBC, the Sierra Club, Travel Channel, Atlas Obscura, and Lonely Planet. Her first film, Keeper of the Mountains, screened more than 500 times in 32 countries with a special screening at McMurdo Station in Antarctica.