Tracy Droz Tragos
Tracy Droz Tragos is a producer and director, known for her 2014 documentary, Rich Hill.
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Tracy's Bio

 

 

 

Tracy Droz Tragos

Writer, Director & Producer

Tracy (she/her/hers) is a 2021 Sundance Screenwriting and Directing Fellow, a 2021 Susan Nimoy Fellow and Lynn Auerbach Fellow and a 2022 Adrienne Shelly Foundation recipient for the development her narrative feature film debut The Macrobiotic Stoner, based on a true story.

Tracy is also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, and winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize 2014 for her moving documentary Rich Hill, which explores the stories of three adolescent boys coming of age in small-town Missouri. Rich Hill’s other honors include Best Film at Michael Moore’s Traverse City Film Festival, Best Director Award at the Sarasota Film Festival, Best Heartland film at the Kansas City Film Festival, and Best Generation Next at the Documentary Edge Film Festival. The film was broadcast on the PBS series Independent Lens, and was released theatrically and digitally throughout the US and internationally. 

In 2020, Tracy was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, honoring her expanded work on the New York Times Op-Doc Sarah - now called BEFORE & AFTER, which has been ten years in the making. It is slated for a 2024 release.

Tracy’s feature documentary Abortion: Stories Women Tell premiered at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival and was broadcast to wide acclaim on HBO in 2017.  Her remarkably non-political approach was said to have added a human and personal element to a deeply divisive debate. In 2018, this work was nominated for a Cinema Eye Honors and a News and Documentary Emmy.

Tracy’s first documentary, Be Good, Smile Pretty, is a powerful film about the profound and complicated feelings of loss caused by the deaths of American servicemen in Vietnam, some thirty-five years later as it explored the emotional impact of the loss of Tracy’s own father in that war. The film aired on PBS’s Independent Lens winning the 2004 Emmy for Best Documentary, The Jury Award for Best Documentary at the Los Angeles Film Festival, and a Cine Golden Eagle Award. It continues to be used today by the VA and veterans’ organizations as a tool to support veterans’ processing of grief and painful memories of their transition home. 

Tracy was commissioned by Emerson Collective to make a feature documentary based on the New York Times-bestseller Smartest Kids In the World, about the crisis in U.S. high school education, which is slated for a 2021 release on Discovery+.  In early 2020, Tracy was embedded for 15 days at the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Northern Kenya, as she directed an episode of the new documentary series Heroes for the Planet, chronicling the building of a school there. 

Tracy’s work has received support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Cinereach, IDA and ITVS. She is a Film Independent Documentary Lab and Sundance Documentary Lab alumna, participating as both a director and producer, and a past Sundance Women Filmmaking Fellow.