About

Dana Turken is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker whose work lives somewhere between the real and the surreal, the dramatic and the comically absurd. She currently directs documentary and narrative-driven brand films internationally, translating complex subjects into human stories.

She has directed and produced for Microsoft, Lincoln Motors, Adidas, Clorox, Hard Rock, The Honest Company, Vanity Fair, VICE, Live Nation, the National Park Foundation, and the Breakthrough Prize Foundation. Her work has taken her across North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

Her films have screened at Palm Springs, Comic-Con, LA Film Festival, Seattle, Tribeca, Austin, Woodstock, Mill Valley, Athens, Camerimage, Cucalorus, Reeling Chicago LGBTQ+, and many more. 

She was a fellow in the Sundance Screenwriters Intensive with her script YES NO HELLO GOODBYE, which was one of 10 semifinalists in the Slamdance Screenplay Awards and a finalist in Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope Screenplay Competition. She was a Film Independent Project Involve Directing Fellow and participated in Film Independent’s Screenwriting Lab with her project LOVE ON THE TUNDRA. She is an alumna of Berlinale Talents, a recipient of a School of Making Thinking residency, and has participated in a Women in Film Peer Mentorship circle and the Commercial Directors Diversity Program as a semi-finalist. 

She grew up outside of Detroit and spent her youth training as a dancer; her love for the body in motion still informs all of her work. She received her MFA in directing from UCLA, graduated from Brown University with a BA in Art/Semiotics, and also studied directing at Prague’s FAMU Film Academy. 

She’s currently working on a documentary about her Nana’s hallucination disorder and developing her feature YES NO HELLO GOODBYE, a magical realist story of a love triangle between a woman, her husband, and the female spirit inhabiting his body.

danaturken@gmail.com