Mona Nicoara
- Producer
- Director
- Writer
Mona Nicoara is a Romanian-born, New York-based filmmaker, festival programmer, and educator. She started out as a poet in a small, largely underground community of young writers who did not abide by the creative conventions of the Ceausescu era. After the 1989 Revolution she began mixing creative work with human rights activism. In the mid-1990s, she moved to New York to attend Columbia. She started working in film in 1997 as an Associate Producer for Children Underground (2001), which received the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. Her directorial debut, Our School (2011), premiered in the US at the Tribeca Film Festival, went on to over 60 festivals worldwide, was awarded the Grand Jury Prize for Best US Feature at SilverDocs, and was nominated for Best Eastern European Documentary at the Silver Eye Awards and for Best Romanian Documentary at the Gopo Awards. The film was released theatrically in Romania, Switzerland, and the US. She is also a festival programmer and has been teaching film at NYU, Rutgers, and SUNY Purchase.