Duane Graves

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Biography, Awards and Accolades

Texas-born Duane Graves arrived on the independent film scene shortly after graduating from a TV/Film program at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi, Texas. He made his directing debut in 2000 with the critically-acclaimed feature documentary Up Syndrome, which embarked on a year-long tour of film festivals around the globe and garnered international press. While continuing film studies at the University of Texas at Austin, Graves co-founded and continues to operate his own production company, Greeks Productions.
    Graves has been awarded with numerous film festival accolades including Best Documentary honors at the 2001 Brooklyn International Film Festival, 2000 Fort Worth Film Festival and the 2000 Temecula Valley International Film Festival. He also received a Best Editing nod for Up Syndrome at the 2001 Brooklyn International Film Festival and a Grand Jury nomination at the 2001 Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Most recently, Graves accepted the National Media Award - Video from the National Down Syndrome Congress in August, 2002.
    To date, Graves' work has been featured in over ten international film festivals including Los Angeles, New York, Park City, Austin, Dallas and Berlin. He was awarded a Texas Filmmaker Production Fund grant in August, 2001, and has been interviewed or reviewed in publications such as Variety, Guerrilla Filmmaker, Indie Slate, Indie Vision, Film Threat and Style & the Family Tunes, a pop-culture magazine in Germany. Graves also sat on a screenwriting panel with Philip Stark (Dude, Where's My Car?) and Clay Tarver (Joy Ride) at the 2002 CineSA Film Focus in San Antonio, Texas.
    In the fall of 2001, Graves finished production on a black and white 16mm experimental short film titled HEADCHEESE with collaborator and fellow film school peer Justin Meeks. HEADCHEESE was co-produced by Kim Henkel, scribe of the original seminal horror film The Texas Chain Saw Masscare and the critically-acclaimed indy gem Last Night At the Alamo. The short screened in several film festivals and was recently acquired by EI Independent Cinema for a January 2003 DVD release with the feature horror film Freak by Tyler Tharpe. HEADCHEESE was also featured in Cult Movies magazine and Shock Cinema magazine, which described Graves' cinematography as having the "gritty backwoods atmosphere of some lost grindhouse classic."
    Graves is currently working in Austin, Texas, and has written or co-written two feature-length scripts: a coming-of-age comedy set in the '80's titled Thunderbird Hills which advanced to the final round of the Sundance Institute's 2007 Feature Film Program Labs, as well as a horror/thriller titled The Wild Man of the Navidad with co-writer Justin Meeks, currently in post-production under Greeks Productions, Inc. The collaborators recently completed another comedy short titled Rio Peligroso: A Day in the Life of a Legendary Coyote, which director Kevin Smith (Clerks, Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back) describes as an "antic, hysterical" film. Rio won Round 1 of Smith's Movies Askew short film contest, and will be widely released on two DVD's in 2008.

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