USA

Born and raised in New Jersey and based in NYC, Emmy and Peabody award-winning filmmaker Phil Bertelsen has a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Rutgers University. He also holds an M.F.A. from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts where he was a Johnson Scholar and a Spike Lee Fellow. His short film, Around the Time, was honored with a Student Academy Award, a Wasserman Award as Best Film at NYU, a Roger Award for Best American Short at the New York/Avignon Film Festival, and Best Short at the Urban World Film Festival. In 2000, Bertelsen finished The Sunshine, an award-winning documentary about a flophouse on New York’s skid row. Around that time he participated in the Sundance Institute Directors’ and Writers’ Workshops. Bertelsen also contributed to Matters of Race, a four-part PBS documentary series on race. Prior to coming to New York, Bertelsen was a producer/director of public affairs for both cable and public television, helping to launch Philadelphia’s public broadcast station WYBE-TV. He directed a documentary special about the presidency of Barack Obama called Through The Fire which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and was broadcast on BET. Bertelsen is a member of both the Director’s and Writer’s Guilds and has taught as part of the adjunct faculty at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, City College of New York and the film department at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Filmography

Around the Time (1997)
The Sunshine (2000)
Outside Looking In: Transracial Adoption in America (2001)
EveryOther (2003)
Rock the Paint (2005)
Beyond the Steps – Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (2006)
The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross with Henry Louis Gates, Jr (2013)
Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (2014)
Nova (2016)
Through the Fire: The Legacy of Barack Obama (2017)
Madam Secretary (2018)
Hope & Fury: MLK, the Movement and the Media (2018)
Nova Wonders (2018)
Who Killed Malcolm X? (2019)