About Nanette
Next Director »Nanette Burstein is an acclaimed director who effortlessly blends authenticity, empathy, and humor to create poignantly crafted worlds. Her commercial projects include campaigns for global brands such as Verizon, Google, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Facebook, and JP Morgan Chase. Nanette has won multiple awards for her advertising work, including two Emmy nominations and a Silver Lion at Cannes. A cinephile from a young age, she relishes filmmaking’s creative possibilities, whether profiling iconic figures through documentaries or telling compelling narratives in short form.
Nanette began her career directing the award-winning film On the Ropes with Brett Morgen. They received an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary, and won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance and the DGA award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement. Since then, she has produced and directed a five-part documentary series with Quincy Jones, Say it Loud: Black Music in America; co-directed the award-winning Robert Evans biography, The Kid Stays in the Picture; and chronicled the lives of high schoolers in Illinois every day for ten months in American Teen, which earned the Documentary Directing Award at the Sundance Film Festival. Her narrative film debut was the romantic comedy Going the Distance, starring Drew Barrymore and Justin Long.
Nanette’s contribution to ESPN’s 30 for 30 series, The Price of Gold, about Tonya Harding, won an Emmy Award and Best Documentary at the Cinema Eye awards. She also directed the feature documentary for Showtime, Gringo: The Dangerous Life of John McAfee, about the eccentric millionaire who was implicated in a murder. In 2020, she directed the four-part series Hillary about Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, which earned the Critics’ Choice Award and an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Non-Fiction Series. In 2022, Nanette directed the three-part Netflix documentary series Killer Sally. Her latest feature documentary film, Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes for HBO, premiered to widespread praise at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. She is currently in production on a feature documentary about Carl Sagan for National Geographic; it is a timely exploration of the universe and the implications of humans’ destructive actions.
Nanette is represented by Institute in the US for commercials and lives in New York City.
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