Bio

Andrea Weiss is an internationally acclaimed documentary filmmaker and nonfiction author. Most recently, Andrea co-produced and directed (with Greta Schiller) and also edited the feature documentary The Five Demands. The film tells the little-known story of a 1969 student strike by Black and Puerto Rican students at the City College of New York that changed the face of higher education. The Five Demands won the Henry Hampton Award for Excellence in Documentary Filmmaking, as well as the Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film. The film had an arthouse cinema release and was broadcast nationally over PBS in Fall 2024, with 92% of stations across the country choosing to program it.

Andrea is also the writer/director/editor of Bones of Contention, a feature documentary delving into the historical memory movement in Spain and the unknown story of LGBT repression under the Franco dictatorship. Bones of Contention premiered in the 2017 Berlin Film Festival, screened on the film festival circuit around the world, and had an art-house cinema release in Spain. It won several jury and audience awards, including in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Valladolid, Spain.

She is also co-writer/director (with Wieland Speck) of Escape to Life, a feature documentary about the lives of Erika and Klaus Mann which premiered in the Rotterdam Film Festival followed by a wide European theatrical and television release. The 35mm film was recently digitally restored to 4K with a grant from the German Film Fund.  Andrea’s additional credits include Seed of Sarah, Paris Was a Woman, A Bit of Scarlet, and Before Stonewall (for which she won an Emmy Award), International Sweethearts of Rhythm, and Tiny & Ruby: Hell Divin’ Women, among others.

Andrea’s books include Paris Was a Woman (Harper Collins, 1995; Counterpoint Press, 2013), which was winner of a Lambda Literary Award, Vampires and Violets (Penguin, 1993), and In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story (University of Chicago Press, 2008), which won a Publishing Triangle Award for Best Nonfiction. It was reissued this year in paperback.  Her books have been translated into French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, , Swedish, Slovenian and Croatian.

Andrea has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and New York Foundation for the Arts as well as a U.S./Spain Fulbright Fellowship. She has been an artist in residence at Yaddo Artist Colony (New York), Banff Center for the Arts (Canada), D.A.A.D. Artist Program (Berlin), Atlantic Center for the Arts (Florida), and BigCi (Australia).

Andrea holds a Ph.D. in American History from Rutgers University which honored her with the Distinguished Alumni Award in the Humanities in 2010.  She is Professor of Film at the City College of New York, where she co-directs the MFA Program in Film and is Founding Director of The Documentary Forum: CCNY Center for Film, Journalism and Interactive Media.