Tracy Tragos
Producer/Director
Tracy Droz Tragos is an award-winning independent filmmaker. Rich Hill won the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, as well as Best Film at Michael Moore’s Traverse City Film Festival, Best Direction Award at the Sarasota Film Festival, Best Heartland Film at the Kansas City Film Festival, and Best Generation Next at the Documentary Edge Film Festival. Before its Independent Lens broadcast, Rich Hill was released theatrically in over 80 markets across the United States.
Tragos’s first film was Be Good, Smile Pretty, a powerful documentary about the profound and complicated feelings of loss caused by the deaths of American men in the Vietnam War, some thirty-five years later. The film aired on Independent Lens and won the 2004 Emmy for Best Documentary, as well as The Jury Award for Best Documentary at the Los Angeles Film Festival, and a Cine Golden Eagle Award. Tragos participated in a year-long engagement campaign reaching thousands of veterans and their families.
Tragos is currently in production on two documentaries that focus on the challenges facing girls in America: one from the perspective of a vulnerable teenage mother and her son in the Midwest; the other from the perspective of girls at a private school in Brentwood, California, who are being groomed to be leaders.
Tragos’s work has received support from the Sundance Institute, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, ITVS, and others. She is a Film Independent Documentary Lab and Sundance Lab alumnae, participating as both a director and a producer. In 2014, Tragos was one of six filmmakers invited to participate in Sundance’s Women Filmmakers Initiative. Tragos holds a B.A. in writing in fiction from Northwestern University and an M.F.A. in screenwriting from USC.
