Sara Nesson

Background

About Sara Nesson

Sara Nesson is a veritè style director and run-n-gun cinematographer, capturing visually striking and complex emotional narratives as they unfold in real-time. She is driven by powerful female-fronted stories including her OSCAR, EMMY nominated, and IDA winning documentary, POSTER GIRL, about the Army’s first female convoy gunner in the Iraq War who returns home to face a new battle with PTSD and the dysfunctional VA system. Sara went on to make the HMMA (Hollywood Music and Media Award) nominated concert documentary, WOMEN WHO SCORE, which looks at the struggles of multi-award-winning female composers (Diane Warren, Laura Karpman, Miriam Cutler, and others) vying to change the score in Hollywood. Her short film WHY WE RUN, featuring two women running for local election, won the 'She is Electable' film challenge. Over the last nine years, Sara has acted as a creative producer and camera operator on director Alison Tavel’s feature documentary, RESYNATOR, about a young woman’s odyssey to find the father she never had a chance to know through a unique synthesizer he invented in the late 70s. The film won the AUDIENCE AWARD for Best Documentary at SXSW 2024. Sara’s work has been seen on HBO, Netflix, and Amazon, and is consumed globally across streaming platforms, film festivals, and social media. In 2020, joined legal film veteran, Liz Oakley of Oakley Productions, applying her artistic vision to settlement documentaries and visual case studies. To be a part of helping law firms win millions in life-changing settlements for their deserving clients is some of her most rewarding work to date. When Sara is not focused on documentaries, she’s skiing in the mountains, writing scripts with her writing group, working out on the beach with her fitness group, or exercising her brain with her Canasta card group. She likes her alone time too. Sara lives in Los Angeles with her significant other and calico cat, Bernie, rescued off the mean streets of San Bernardino.