Susanna Styron

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Susanna Styron’s most recent documentary short, My Father's Name, premiered at the Berkshire International Film Festival in May 2024. Her feature documentary, Out of My Head, premiered at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight and won Best International Documentary at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival. Her short narrative film, House of Teeth, won several awards on the 2018 festival circuit and is available on Amazon. Susanna is the writer/director of the critically acclaimed Columbia Pictures feature film, Shadrach, starring Harvey Keitel and Andie MacDowell, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival. She wrote the TV movies In from the Night and an adaptation of Ann Tyler’s Back When We Were Grown-ups for Hallmark Hall of Fame; Taking Back Our Town for Lifetime, for which she received a Christopher Award and an Environmental Media Award; and Crossing the Line, also for Lifetime. In series television, Susanna has written and directed for A&E’s 100 Centre Street, created by Sidney Lumet; and written for Borgia, created by Tom Fontana. She has developed several television series with Tom Fontana, including Unpredictable, which was sold to AMC’s WE channel. Susanna has published personal essays in Spin Magazine, The Yale Revue, Real Simple Magazine and The New York Times. She holds a B.A. from Yale University and an M.F.A. from the American Film Institute. She has taught directing and screenwriting in Columbia University’s graduate film program; at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts (graduate and undergraduate); and at the Mediterranean Film Institute in Greece.

My Father’s Name Trailer from Susanna Styron on Vimeo.

Years after Lee Ed Frazier’s death, his daughter Jan made a shocking discovery: as a young man her father had participated in a lynching. As she attempts to uncover the truth about what happened, Jan learns that this specific lynching was iconic in American history, because photos of it were the first ever to be published in a national publication. Both Time and Life magazines carried the story and the photos as they reported on the anti-lynching bill that was before Congress at that very moment.

Additionally, she realizes that no names of the lynchers were ever published. Even the photographer was protected by a cloak of agreed-upon anonymity. Shaken by this stark reflection of white privilege and the brutality it sought to minimize, Jan must now reckon with deeply conflicted feelings about the father she loved, find a way to hold her family accountable and face the dawning awareness of her own unconscious racism.

Out of My Head Trailer from Out of My Head documentary on Vimeo. Susanna Styron’s feature documentary Out of My Head had its world premiere in MoMA’s Doc Fortnight on February 20, 2018, followed by a weeklong run at the museum. The film charts the director’s confounding journey with her daughter as they try to get help for her daughter’s migraines. Using animation, art, and filmed footage, Out of My Head takes us into a world populated by doctors, scientists, migraine sufferers, and such unexpected characters as Lewis Carroll, Hildegarde von Bingen, Dwyane Wade, and Joan Didion. On the way we discover that migraine is not just an excruciating headache but a bizarre, highly stigmatized neurological disease afflicting nearly a billion people worldwide.

Out of My Head is available on DVD and streaming platforms in June 2020.