About the Director
Mark Kendall grew up in Ardmore, PA and graduated magna cum laude from Vanderbilt University in 2005 with a B.A. in Anthropology and again in 2008 with a M.A. in Latin American & Iberian Studies as a recipient of a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship to undertake an intensive study of K’iche’, a Mayan language spoken by about one million people in the central highlands of Guatemala. As an undergraduate, he was named to the CEDA All-American debate team and, as a graduate student, continued his involvement with the team at Vanderbilt as an assistant coach.
He first began making films in the summer of 2007 as part of the School for International Training’s “Lens on Latin America” documentary film program in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Mark’s first film, For the People, By the People, about a network of indigenous filmmakers in Bolivia who use film and video technology as part of their struggle for cultural and political representation, screened at the 2008 Student Conference on Latin American Social and Public Policy at the University of Pittsburgh and at over a dozen film festivals around the world, winning a number of “Best Student Film” awards along the way.
His first graduate-level film, The Time Machine, premiered in March 2010 at the Washington DC Independent Film Festival where it was honored with the “Grand Jury Award for Best Student Film.” Since then, it has been named “Best Short Documentary” at the Arizona International Film Festival, “Best Student Film” at the West Chester Film Festival, and was the recipient of the “Silver Palm Award” at the Mexico International Film Festival. The Time Machine was the winner of Telegraph21′s “Best of Student DOCS” Contest and has recently been awarded with a 2010 CINE Golden Eagle Award and a 2011 CINE Special Jury Award for the Best Student Documentary. It is currently a Finalist for the 2011 Student Academy Awards.
Before beginning his MFA at the School of Visual Arts’ Social Documentary Film program, Mark spent a summer backpacking around Europe, worked as a private tutor in Nashville, TN, and studied medical anthropology in Carhuaz, Peru. He currently lives in Brooklyn, where he is working on his first feature-length documentary, “LA CAMIONETA.”
