Gregory Scott Williams, Jr. is an award-winning filmmaker who has written, directed and produced several short films. His current documentary, Selfies From The Hill, was awarded a 2016 Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh Grant from The Pittsburgh Foundation and The Heinz Endowments and was selected to participate in The National Black Programming Consortium’s 2016 360 Incubator & Fund. His current feature screenplay, Window Pains, was awarded a 2014 Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh Grant from The Pittsburgh Foundation and The Heinz Endowments.

 

His other films include the documentary Tar Baby Jane, which received a 2014 Paul Robeson Award from the Newark Black Film Festival and was awarded grants from The Heinz Endowments, the Pittsburgh Foundation’s Multicultural Arts Initiative and the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council: Tar Baby Jane aired on PCTV’s Indie Film Forum in 2015; Introducing August Wilson and Urban Innovator, which were awarded grants from the Pittsburgh Foundation and Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council: both shorts aired on PBS affiliate WQED as part of Filmmakers Corner in 2013; Dance Chile, which was nominated for a DGA African American Student Award for Directing; and Sonny’s Blues, an adaptation of the short story written by James Baldwin, which aired on ABC and CBS.

 

Greg has also produced a number of independent shorts, most notably five deep breaths, which screened at the Sundance Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, New York Film Festival and Los Angeles Film Festival, where it won the Best Narrative Short Award.

 

Greg attended Morehouse College as an undergraduate and majored in English Literature. While at Morehouse, Greg was an UNCF Scholar and studied the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He was also a Merrill Scholar and studied Creative Writing and English Literature at Hertford College, University of Oxford in England.

 

Greg attended New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts Graduate Film Program.  As a graduate student at NYU, Greg received the Lew Wasserman Scholarship.  He was also a Tisch School of the Arts Scholar and studied at the FAMU School of Film and Television in Prague, where he received an Excellence in Directing Certificate for his short film Kolos Zloga. He also studied screenwriting in Paris as a Tisch School of the Arts Scholar.

 

Greg has been selected to participate in several fellowship and artists development programs: including, Film Independent’s Project: Involve; IFP’s No Boarders International Co-production Program; Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ Flight School; and The Game Changers Project.