BCCAC – Mason Richards

MASON RICHARDS | AVBA

Writer/Director MASON RICHARDS was born in Guyana, South America, and emigrated to Brooklyn New York with his family at age 7, where he spent most of his youth. Mason has a B.A. in English: Intellectual History and a B.S. in Human & Organizational Development from Vanderbilt University, Class of ’97, and has worked as a Broadcast Associate at CBS News in NYC, and in International Sales & Marketing at Paramount Pictures in Los Angeles before deciding to pursue his Master’s degree in Filmmaking as a way to tell stories in Hollywood that often get overlooked. Mason has an MFA in Film Directing from California Institute of the Arts (CAL ARTS) where he made his award-winning short thesis film THE SEAWALL shot entirely on location in Guyana, South America, and was an official selection for the Cannes Film Festival (2011) in France, the Havana International Film Festival in Cuba (2014) and has screened at festivals, museums and universities in the UK, Toronto, Mexico and throughout the Caribbean including The Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival (2014, and The Island House Cinema in the Bahamas. Mason is the recipient of the 2012 Sony Pictures Diversity Fellowship.

Mason is a professor, adjunct faculty of film directing and screenwriting at Emerson College-Los Angeles, and a regular ‘Filmmaker in Residence’ at Ithaca College, and works as a Creative Consultant and Facilitator of cross-cultural communication for numerous non-profits, colleges and universities internationally, and produces digital content and mini-docs around diversity,

During his time at Vanderbilt, Mason directed the university’s first African American student theatre production, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf by Ntozake Shange, an experience that planted the seed for Richards’ pursuit of a film-directing career. Mason was also the recipient of the Umoja Award for Unity presented by the BCC at the time and is the founding president of the Alpha Gamma Alpha Charter of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity Inc. at Vanderbilt. Mason is currently in working feature-length version of his award-winning short film THE SEAWALL and loves to split his time between New York City and Los Angeles.