Shawn Snyder grew up in South Florida. After receiving a BA in Religion from Harvard, he spent most of his twenties on the road as a singer-songwriter. The last seven years have seen a return to Shawn’s long-standing passion for filmmaking, during which he completed studies at NYU’s Graduate Film Program and made the short films Festus and Lulu. Snyder’s first feature, To Dust, premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival, where it won the Narrative Audience Award and Best New Narrative Director; it opens in theaters through Good Deed Entertainment on February 8. To Dust was a part of IFP’s 2015 Emerging Storytellers, the recipient of the NYU/Alfred P. Sloan’s $100K First Feature Award, the winner of TFI’s 2016 Sloan Student Grand Jury Prize, and a part of the NYU Production Lab’s inaugural slate. Snyder is also a former IFP/Marcie Bloom Fellow and Sundance Institute Feature Film Fellow, and was named one of Filmmaker magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2016.
