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N. Scott Momaday: Words from a Bear examines the enigmatic life and mind of National Medal of Arts-winner Navarro Scott Momaday, the Kiowa novelist, short-story writer, essayist and poet. His Pulitzer Prize-winning novel House Made of Dawn led to the breakthrough of Native American literature into the mainstream. The film premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and aired nationally on the PBS series, American Masters. In 2020, the film was nominated for an Emmy in support of American Masters’ 33rd season, for Outstanding Documentary or Non-Fiction Series. The film also won the 2019 Ted Turner Award for the film that most encourages environmental stewardship.

About Jeffrey Palmer

Jeffrey Palmer, a member of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma, is an award-winning filmmaker and media artist. He describes his work as a multimedia exploration of Indigenous people’s lives in twenty-first century America. He recently completed his first feature film, “N. Scott Momaday: Words from a Bear”, examining the life and mind of the first Native American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for literature. The film premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and aired nationally on the PBS series, American Masters. In 2020, the film was nominated for an Emmy in support of American Masters’ 33rd season, for Outstanding Documentary or Non-Fiction Series. The film also won the 2019 Ted Turner Award for the film that most encourages environmental stewardship.

Of Palmer’s numerous short films, “Isabelle’s Garden”, was a winner of the Bill and Melinda Gates Short Film Challenge at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. Palmer’s films have also screened at venues such as Hot Docs, The Seattle International Film Festival, The Berlinale European Market, The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, and many others around the world. He received numerous awards, grants, and recognition from the Sundance Institute, ITVS, Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Cornell University, and the Firelight Media Documentary Lab. He is a member of the Directors Guild of America, International Documentary Association, Television Academy, and is an associate professor of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. He is currently working on his second feature film “Ghosts” and completing a project for the Barack Obama Foundation and the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago Illinois.