Mona Nicoara

Mona Nicoara is a Romanian-born, New York-based filmmaker, festival programmer, and educator. She started out as a poet in a small, largely underground community of young writers who did not abide by the creative conventions of the Ceausescu era. After the 1989 Revolution she began mixing creative work with human rights activism. In the mid-1990s, she moved to New York to attend Columbia. She started working in film in 1997 as an Associate Producer for Children Underground (2001), which received the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. Her directorial debut, Our School (2011), premiered in the US at the Tribeca Film Festival, went on to over 60 festivals worldwide, was awarded the Grand Jury Prize for Best US Feature at SilverDocs, and was nominated for Best Eastern European Documentary at the Silver Eye Awards and for Best Romanian Documentary at the Gopo Awards. The film was released theatrically in Romania, Switzerland, and the US. Her second feature-length documentary, "The Distance between Me and Me," received a Gopo Award for best Romanian documentary and the audience award at Films de Cannes à Bucarest, screened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Trieste, among others, and was the highest-grossing documentary in Romania in 2019. Nicoara's other collaborations include principal consulting on Alexander Nanau's double Oscar-nominated "Collective" (2019) and on his Cinema Eye Honors-winner "Toto and His Sisters" (2014), as well as on Ana Lungu's "Triton" (2024). She is also a festival programmer and has been teaching film NYU, Rutgers, and SUNY Purchase.