BRANDON VEDDER

Brandon Vedder is an award-winning filmmaker whose work explores the complexities of belief, identity, and the search for meaning through intimate, character-driven storytelling. Over a career spanning more than two decades, he has directed, produced, shot, and edited films around the world.

Vedder began his career touring with and making films about musicians, shooting for concert films including Pearl Jam: Live at the Garden. That work eventually led him from music into documentary filmmaking and a long-running creative partnership with filmmaker Patrick Shen and Transcendental Media. In 2013, Vedder produced, edited, and shot La Source, narrated by Academy Award-nominated actor Don Cheadle.

In 2015, Vedder directed, shot, and edited the documentary short A Certain Kind of Light, which received six Best Documentary awards and aired nationally on PBS in 2017 as part of the Emmy-winning season of Life on the Line. The following year, In Pursuit of Silence, which Vedder produced and shot with longtime collaborator Patrick Shen, premiered at SXSW before receiving an international theatrical release and earning a 91% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Vedder made his feature directorial debut with Strange Negotiations, which premiered at SXSW in 2019 to major critical acclaim and went on to play 30 cities across the country before becoming available worldwide on streaming platforms.

His latest feature, Illuminations, reunites Vedder and Shen as co-directors and continues a creative partnership spanning more than a decade. An intimate and experimental portrait of legendary avant-garde filmmakers Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler and their more than 60 years of shared life and filmmaking, Illuminations will premiere in the fall of 2026.

Vedder is also in post-production on Film¹/ASAP, another feature documentary co-directed with Shen. Filmed over nearly a decade, the film follows a 639-year-long musical performance unfolding within a medieval German church, where individual chords are sustained for years at a time. Through the life of the work's aging caretaker and the rare global gatherings surrounding each chord change, the film explores slowness, devotion, mortality, and the rhythms required to sustain a work designed to outlive everyone involved.

An alumnus of the SFFILM residency program, Vedder has taught master classes at Northwest Film Forum, served as an advisor for Sundance Collab, and guest lectured at institutions including Stanford University. His work has received support from The Redford Center, The Rogovy Foundation, Fork Films, and The Fledgling Fund, and has been featured in Variety, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, VICE, and The Washington Post, among others.

Vedder was recently named a Stowe Story Labs Diverse Voices Fellow for Miracle Man, his one-hour dramatic limited series based on the extraordinary true story behind the Academy Award-winning documentary Marjoe.