Yance Ford is an award-winning film director and producer.

His film Strong Island won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Storytelling at Sundance Film Festival in 2017 and is featured in the Netflix catalog. Strong Island is a gripping meditation on Ford's own family and tackles grief, racism and the quest for justice after the murder of Ford's brother, William, in 1992. But Strong Island is about more than just racial violence and the failings of the criminal justice system -- it excellently unpacks how a family was destroyed after the loss of a loved one.

When Strong Island was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2018, Ford became the first openly transgender man to be nominated for an Academy Award. That same year, he and his collaborator, Joslyn Barnes, were awarded the Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking for producing Strong Island, which made him the first openly transgender man and the first black openly transgender person to win an Emmy Award.

Ford is a recipient of the Creative Capital Award, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Sundance Documentary Film Program Fellowship, and was among Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2011.

For ten years, Ford was privileged to work as Series Producer for PBS, where his curatorial work helped garner over 16 Emmy nominations.

Ford is also an architectural welder, and while at Modern Art Foundry he helped assemble the Louise Bourgeois sculpture "Maman" -- the series of three spiders exhibited at Rockefeller Center, now on permanent display at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

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