Lawrence Lerew

Roles: Director

Lawrence Lerew is an Emmy nominated documentary filmmaker with a passion for character driven narratives that strive for emotional truth, cinematic beauty and cultural relevance. He is best known for the Oscar Short Listed film The Waiting Room (2012) about Oakland’s public hospital, as well as the The Force, which examined Oakland’s police department’s efforts to make reforms and premiered at Sundance in 2017.

Some of his earlier credits include editing Wounded Knee (Sundance, 2009) which revisited the American Indian Movement’s 1973 take over of sacred land and subsequent armed stand-off with the government, and the Oscar-nominated The Most Dangerous Man in America (2009) that retraced the story of Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. In 2013 he edited The Kill Team which was awarded Best Documentary Feature at The Tribeca Film Festival and nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Journalism.

As an independent filmmaker Lawrence enjoys a close relationship with PBS who have aired all his feature documentaries. He has been granted a fellowship from The Sundance Institute and serves as a ITVS mentor for young filmmakers. He recently served as a consulting editor on Elizabeth Lo’s Stray, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and was released by Magnolia Pictures.