Lauren Knapp is a non-fiction storyteller who works across platforms to share true and compelling stories. She has been working in film, television, and radio since 2006 and her stories have been broadcast on the PBS NewsHour, PRI’s The World, WQED, and The Allegheny Front. In 2011, she moved to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia with the support of a Fulbright-mtvU Fellowship where she researched and produced Live From UB (2015), an award-winning feature length documentary on rock music and national identity among Mongolia’s urban youth. She recently won the “Emerging Director of a Documentary Feature” award for Live From UB from the Asian American International Film Festival.

With a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Grinnell College, Lauren incorporates the principals of participant observation into her filmmaking. Her topics of interest range widely, but all aim to personalize deeper, more complex societal issues. Recent topics have included the practice of active shooter safety drills in elementary schools (Lockdown, 2015), citizen scientists who blur the line between biological innovation and body modification (Science for the Masses, 2015), and the experience of aging and solitude among four women in their 80s (Neighbors in Time, 2015). She is currently pursuing an MFA in Documentary Film & Video from Stanford University and is the recent recipient of the Francis D. Lyon Scholarship awarded by Phi Delta Theta and the Jerry Jensen Memorial Scholarship awarded by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.