Penny Lane has been making innovative nonfiction films for over a decade, including 8 feature documentaries. Some of these titles are HAPPY AND YOU KNOW IT, CONFESSIONS OF A GOOD SAMARITAN, LISTENING TO KENNY G, HAIL SATAN?, NUTS! and OUR NIXON. Her films have premiered at Sundance, Toronto, Tribeca, SXSW and Rotterdam, and have been financed and/or distributed by partners like HBO, Hulu, Magnolia Pictures, Netflix, Anonymous Content, Fremantle, Impact Partners, Sandbox Films, Concordia and Jigsaw.

Penny is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2018 she was honored with a Chicken & Egg Breakthrough Award, received the Vanguard Award at SF DocFest, and was admitted into the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.  She has been honored to receive mid-career retrospectives at the Museum of the Moving Image, Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, San Francisco DocFest, Open City Documentary Festival and Cinema Moderne.

She has been awarded grants and fellowships from Sundance Institute, Creative Capital, Cinereach, TFI Documentary Fund, Wexner Center for the Arts, Jerome Foundation, Catapult Film Fund, MacDowell, Yaddo and many other organizations.  She’s won many awards (including a Sundance Jury Prize for Editing) but is probably most proud of being “Most Badass!” at the Iowa City Documentary Film Festival in 2009, or perhaps being named “Queen of Documentary Cinema” by the Winchester Alamo Film Club in 2023.

Penny’s short films are distributed by VTAPE and include titles such as THE VOYAGERS (2010), JUST ADD WATER (2016) and WE ARE THE LITTLETONS: A TRUE STORY (2004). Her 2005 half-hour documentary THE ABORTION DIARIES has screened in at least 42 states & worldwide at over 350 different community venues, ranging from bars to art centers to clinics to colleges, and on Yes! Television and Free Speech TV. 

Penny was a college professor for over a decade, teaching film, video and new media art at Colgate University, Bard College, Hampshire College and Williams College. Now she works full time as a film director and co-founder with Gabriel Sedgwick of the production company Spinning Nancy. She and Gabriel Executive Produced the hit HBO documentary TIME BOMB Y2K.

And yes, Penny Lane is her real name (see FAQ).