Shawn Snyder grew up in South Florida. After receiving a B.A. in Religion from Harvard, he spent most of his 20s on the road as a singer/songwriter. The last seven years have seen a return to Shawn’s long-standing passion for filmmaking, during which he completed studies at NYU’s Graduate Film Program. His short film, Festus (2014), won the 2014 CINE Golden Eagle Award for Best Student Drama and later premiered on KQED’s Film School Shorts. His follow-up, Lulu (2015), premiered at the Palm Springs International ShortFest in 2015.
His first feature, To Dust (2018), premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival where it won the Narrative Audience Award and Best New Narrative Director. To Dust was a part of IFP’s 2015 Emerging Storytellers, the recipient of the NYU/Alfred P. Sloan’s $100K First Feature Award, the winner of TFI’s 2016 Sloan Student Grand Jury Prize, and a part of the NYU Production Lab’s inaugural slate.

Shawn is also a former IFP/Marcie Bloom Fellow and Sundance Institute Feature Film Fellow, and was named one of Filmmaker Magazine‘s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2016.