Steven Bognar is an independent filmmaker and media arts educator. His first film, Personal Belongings, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and screened nationally on the PBS series P.O.V. It won numerous awards, including the Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival, Best First Film at the Ann Arbor Film Festival and the Audience Award for Best Film at the Atlanta Film and Video Festival. His second film, Picture Day, won Best Documentary Short at the Florida Film Festival, screened at the Sundance Film Festival, in numerous film festivals and at the Guggenheim Museum. His third film, Gravel, also premiered at Sundance and screens regularly on the Sundance Channel. Bognar is former assistant professor of media arts at Antioch College and has, for the last 15 years, worked as a filmmaker-in-residence in schools throughout Ohio. Bognar’s work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, The Soros Documentary Fund, the Creative Capital Foundation, the Ohio Humanities Council, the Ohio Arts Council and Culture Works. He is also a Rockefeller Fellow.
His Emmy-winning, four-hour verité epic A Lion in the House—worked on at MacDowell with collaborator Julia Reichert—followed five Cincinnati-area families and their caregivers, all grappling with childhood cancer. Their 2019 documentary, American Factory, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary.
