An outside headshot of Reid, a white man with curly hair. He stands outside in a yellow button-up shirt. The sun slightly flares into the shade of surrounding green trees.

An outside headshot of Reid, a white man with curly hair. He stands outside in a yellow button-up shirt. The sun slightly flares into the shade of surrounding green trees.

Reid Davenport makes documentaries about disability from an overtly political perspective. Reid’s first feature film, I Didn’t See You There, won the Directing Award for U.S. Documentary at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and the Truer Than Fiction Award at the 2023 Independent Spirit Awards. The film also won the Grand Jury Prize at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and the McBaine Bay Area Documentary Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival. It broadcasted nationally on POV in January 2023. The film has been hailed by critics:  Nick Allen of Roger Ebert described it as “first-person poetry in captivating motion, expressed with a singular, assured artistic voice.” Vox called it a “must-see.”

His film currently in production, Life After, is being produced by Multitude Films and has been supported by the Ford Foundation, Field of Vision and the Sundance Institute.. In 2020, Reid was named to DOC NYC’s “40 Filmmakers Under 40.” His short film, A Cerebral Game, won the Artistic Vision Award at the 2016 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival for “creating a visual landscape that is at once disorienting and nostalgic - and the result is so raw and compelling it’s impossible to turn away.” Along with A Cerebral Game, his short documentaries Wheelchair Diaries and RAMPED UP are distributed by New Day Films. Reid’s work has been supported by The Ford Foundation, Sundance Institute, Creative Capital, XTR, ITVS, NBCUniversal, CNN and the Points North Institute, among others.

Reid was a 2017 TED Fellow and gave a TED Talk about incorporating his own literal body into his filmmaking. His work has been featured by outlets like NPR, PBS, The Washington Post, MSNBC, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Davenport received a Master of Fine Arts in Documentary Film & Video from Stanford University in 2016, and a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism and Mass Communication from The George Washington University in 2012.