Independent filmmaker Yemane I. Demissie has received numerous awards, grants and fellowships for his work, including the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Walter Mosley Award for Best Documentary, the Locarno Film Festival Production Grant, the AFI Filmmaker's Grant, and the Best American Independent Film Nominee for the Golden Starfish Award.
Demissie is currently in postproduction for The Quantum Leapers: Ethiopia 1930-1975, a six-part social history documentary series. He is also developing …and then the rains return, a narrative feature set during the 1918 influenza pandemic.
He has recently completed co-producing and editing Asni: The Life of Asnaketch Worku, a feature documentary about the preeminent Ethiopian actor and chanteuse.
In 2009, Demissie directed, produced, and edited two films: Dead Weight, a narrative feature about an Ethiopian/Angelino woman who confronts a man who had tortured her in home country; and, Twilight Revelations: Episodes in the Life and Times of Emperor Haile Selassie, a feature documentary about the final Ethiopian monarch. Tumult, his first narrative feature, screened at more than 40 international film festivals including Rotterdam, London, Hamptons, AFI, FESPACO, and Seattle.
Demissie is an associate professor in the Department of Film and Television at NYU where he teaches writing, directing, narrative and documentary production, and film history and criticism. Prior to his move to New York, he taught at the USC School of Cinematic Arts and UCLA Extension. He received his M.F.A. in film directing from the UCLA School of Theatre, Film & Television and his B.S.C. and B.A. from Moorhead State University.
