Ben Niles Filmmaker. Storyteller.

Ben Niles Filmmaker. Storyteller.

Ben Niles is an award-winning documentary filmmaker. His film, “Note By Note (The Making of Steinway L1037),” (IFP 2005) won top honors at the Sarasota Film Festival, was nominated for an IDA award and selected to the prestigious American Film Showcase, and has screened in over 30 countries. It has now been translated into 5 languages and has aired nationally on PBS since 2009. His most recent film Some Kind of Spark (IFP 2012) was also selected to the American Film Showcase and will premiere on PBS in the fall of 2016. He is currently co-directing “Still We Rise” with producer Molly Raskin, a film about mental health in Liberia.

Commercially, he brings his documentary approach to produce videos for Ford, Razorfish, J. Walter Thompson and The PBS NewsHour and has worked with artists including Amy Ray of Indigo Girls, Punch Brothers, Wynton Marsalis, Harry Connick, Jr., Jason Moran, Lang Lang, Helene Grimaud and Rufus Wainwright. In his earlier years as an Art Director in the record industry, Ben created album packages for Collective Soul (Entertainment Weekly’s Best 100 Album Covers 2000), Jewel, Jon Brion, Hootie and the Blowfish, celebrated box-sets for Phish and George Carlin, and packages and identities for jazz musicians Cyrus Chestnut, James Carter and Henry Butler.

A graduate of the University of Georgia at Athens, Ben attended UGA’s prestigious Cortona program, an intensive fine arts study-abroad program located in Cortona, Italy.