About the Filmmaker

Kurt Kuenne is an award-winning filmmaker and composer of both fiction and documentary films. He grew up in Silicon Valley, where at age 7, he met the late Dr. Andrew Bagby, the subject of Dear Zachary. He began making films as soon as he was old enough to pick up a camera; these early films, all of which featured Andrew, became a treasure trove for this documentary.

Kurt continued to hone his craft in college, graduating magna cum laude from the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television in 1995, where he won the Harold Lloyd Scholarship in Film Editing, and studied Scoring for Motion Pictures & Television at the USC School of Music under the tutelage of classic film composers Buddy Baker and David Raksin.

In 1999, he completed his first feature film, the teen drama Scrapbook starring Eric Balfour, which garnered strong reviews, awards and landed him on Filmmaker magazine's annual list of the top 25 new faces of independent cinema. He followed it with Drive-In Movie Memories (2001), a documentary chronicling the outdoor movie-going experience, which opened the 2001 Telluride Film Festival and went on to play more than 45 festivals before becoming a popular hit with PBS audiences in the United States.

In 2002, he won a Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences for his screenplay Mason Mule, while his screenplay Explode made the quarterfinals in the same year.  He then directed an ongoing series of black & white short film comedies, beginning with the enormously popular Rent-A-Person (2004), which played more than 30 film festivals in North America while picking up multiple audience and jury awards.  The run was continued with the next film in the series, Validation (2006) starring TJ Thyne (Bones), which at this writing has played 40 festivals worldwide, won 19 awards and garnered more in prize money than the film’s production budget.  He recently completed two more installments in the series, Slow and The Phone Book, which are currently playing film festivals.

As a composer, in addition to his own films his work includes re-scoring the restoration of the silent classic Cyrano de Bergerac (1925), for which the original score was lost. His score was premiered by the San Diego Symphony and has become a perennial fixture on Turner Classic Movies and French television. He also scored the Luke Wilson thriller Bad Seed (2000) and the Douglas Spain indie film Hunting of Man (2002).

He is managed by Aaron Kaplan and Sean Perrone at Kaplan/Perrone Entertainment.

Related links: