Reid Davenport makes documentaries about disability from an overtly political perspective.
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’s first two feature films, Life After (2025) and I Didn’t See You There (2022), both premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and respectively won a Special Jury Award and the Directing Award. Variety called Life After “engrossing, moving, and most importantly, confrontational,” while Indiewire said it was “passionate and persuasive… upends expectations.” Nick Allen of Roger Ebert described I Didn’t See You There as “first-person poetry in captivating motion, expressed with a singular, assured artistic voice,” while Vox called it a “must-see.”
I Didn’t See You There won the True Than Fiction Award at the 2023 Independent Spirit Awards and was broadcast nationally on PBS’s syndicated series POV. Life After is slated to air on PBS’s syndicated series Independent Lens later this year and currently has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
LIFE AFTER, Reid’s second feature film, won a SPECIAL JURY AWARD at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.
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, 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 The New York Times, The New Yorker, 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.