Biography

Yance Ford is an Oscar nominated director and producer based in New York City. His debut film Strong Island won the 2017 Sundance U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award, the Gotham Award for Best Documentary, and the Black Film Critics Circle Award for Best Doc. Strong Island was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 90th Academy Awards, where Ford made history as the first transgender director nominated for an Oscar. Strong Island won the Primetime Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Film and was nominated for a George Foster Peabody Award.

At the 2018 Cinema Eye Honors, Ford became the first nominee ever to win Best Direction, Best Debut, and Best Feature.

His work can be seen in the FX series Pride, the Netflix series Trial by Media, the Apple+ series The Me You Can't See, the Showtime comedy Work In Progress, and the documentary The Color of Care on The Smithsonian Channel. Ford was a staff writer in the HBO mini-room for adapting the bestselling novel The Vanishing Half.

Yance is a former Series Producer at the documentary anthology series POV where, during his tenure with the series, his curatorial work at POV garnered 5 Emmy Awards and 16 Emmy nominations.

Ford is a MacDowell Colony Fellow, and Sundance Institute Fellow and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019. His work has been supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, Creative Capital, Cinereach, The Ford Foundation, and others.

Ford is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Directors Guild of America. His next feature film is a Netflix Original documentary set for release in 2023.
- IMDb mini biography by: Yance Ford

First openly transgender person (and filmmaker) and the first black openly transgender person to be nominated for an Academy Award. He was nominated for his work on Strong Island (2017).

He became the first openly transgender man and the first black openly transgender person to win an Emmy award, as well as the first openly transgender filmmaker to win a Creative Arts Emmy.