Robert Hawk

BIOGRAPHY

Robert Hawk, longtime advisor to filmmakers and film festivals, has had his own business for 20 years.  Producer of Kimberly Reed's Prodigal Sons, Dayna Goldfine & Daniel Geller's Ballets Russes, David Munro's Full Grown Men, Jim Fall's Trick, Alex & Andrew Smith's The Slaughter Rule and Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy, Hawk has been a part of the independent film scene for 30

years.

Starting with his involvement in documentary as a researcher on Rob Epstein's Oscar-winning The Times of Harvey Milk, he has been credited with discovering and/or nurturing the talents of such filmmakers as Epstein, Kevin Smith (beginning with Clerks), Joe Carnahan (from Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane to Pride and Glory), Ed Burns (The Brothers McMullen), David Siegel and Scott McGehee (The Deep End), Rodrigo Bellott (Sexual Dependency), Nathaniel Kahn (My Architect), Paul Devlin (The Front Man, Blast!, Power Trip, SlamNation), and Geller & Goldfine (The Galapogos Affair: Satan Came to Eden, Something Ventured, Kids of Survival/Emmy award, Frosh). He has consulted on films as varied as Terry George's Some Mother's Son, Tim Blake Nelson's Eye of God, Lisa Krueger's Manny and Lo, Tom Bezucha's Big Eden, Jon Shear's Urbania, and Smith's Red State and Dogma, among others.  He has also consulted on hundreds of documentaries, including Oscar winners/nominees such as Common Threads, Regret to Inform, In the Shadow of the Stars, Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter and Troublesome Creek: A Midwestern.

Hawk served on the Advisory Selection Committee of the Sundance Film Festival for its entire existence (1987-1998). He currently serves on the advisory boards of Independent Film Week (IFP/NY) and The Legacy Project (a collaboration of Outfest and the UCLA Film and Television Archives). He has also been an advisor for AIFA (American Independents and Features Abroad) at the Berlin Film Festival, First Look (Tribeca Film Center/Eastman Kodak), the original Los Angeles Independent Film Festival and numerous other festivals.  He has served on many festival juries, both domestic and international, and has curated special film series for, among others, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the M.H. de Young Museum in San Francisco, the International Documentary Congress in Los Angeles, and the Melbourne and Sundance film festivals.

He founded San Francisco's Film Arts Festival in 1985, a showcase for independent filmmakers of Northern California, and was its director for eight years.  As Exhibition Coordinator for the Film Arts Foundation, he not only programmed exhibition events year round but viewed and critiqued films at all stages of production, consulted with makers on festival and distribution strategies, and was an outreach resource for exhibitors, programmers, curators, festival directors and distributors throughout the world.

THEATER BIO: Before his involvement in film, Hawk worked in theater, first in various technical and managerial capacities, later as a production stage manager. Shows included MacBird!, Your Own Thing, Dames at Sea, Sal Mineo's version of Fortune and Men's Eyes, Oh! Calcutta!, and Charles Gordone's Pulitzer Prize-winning No Place to Be Somebody. He continues to support and produce new plays for the theater, including Michael Albanese's Red Herring (NY Int'l Fringe Festival 2006), a staged reading of Albanese's Turning Night in the Dying House with Richard Easton and Logan Marshall-Green and Jason Schafer's Notes on the Land of Earthquake & Fire (FringeNYC 2009).  

HERE