Independent filmmaker Shon Keane makes innovative documentaries about people overlooked by history and dark, funny portraits of dysfunctional families learning to love and laugh while living with catastrophe.

 

Selected for the “Filmmakers of Tomorrow” program at Telluride with their teen misfit dramedy “The Prom Queen,” Shon is currently screening at film festivals with their first feature documentary “Finding Bernie,” which follows the search for their gender non-conforming role model from the 1970s. 

 

Shon has written several award-winning feature screenplays including “Pansy,” a queer forbidden love story, which won the IFP Emerging Narrative Screenplay Award and “My Name Is Debra Hopkins” (co-written with Melanie RW Oram), which won Best Screenplay at The Imagine This Women’s Festival. The dramatic biopic is based on a memoir of a Black Baptist minister and trans woman who was wrongfully arrested for armed robbery and struggled to hold onto her mental health as she fought a coverup in the Alabama State Police. 

 

A graduate of the Columbia University Film Division, Shon is an Associate Professor of Media Arts at the City University of New York (BMCC) and a yoga and mindfulness instructor who in their spare time can be found in Central Park staring at trees or spinning like a whirling dervish.