About

Dana Turken is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker whose work lives somewhere between the real and the surreal, the dramatic and the comically absurd.

Her films have screened at Palm Springs, Comic-Con, LA Film Festival, Seattle, Tribeca, Austin, Woodstock, Mill Valley, Athens, Camerimage, Cucalorus, Reeling Chicago LGBTQ+, and many more.

She has directed and produced branded content for Lincoln Motors, Adidas, Clorox, Microsoft, Hard Rock, The Honest Company, Vanity Fair, VICE, Live Nation, the National Park Foundation, and the Breakthrough Foundation. 

She was a fellow in the Sundance Screenwriters Intensive with her script YES NO HELLO GOODBYE, which was a semifinalist in the Slamdance Screenplay Awards and a finalist in Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope. She was a Film Independent Project Involve Directing Fellow and participated in Film Independent’s Screenwriting Lab with my project LOVE ON THE TUNDRA. She is an alumna of Berlinale Talents, the School of Making Thinking, and has participated in a Women in Film Peer Mentorship circle and in the Commercial Directors Diversity Program as a semi-finalist. 

She grew up outside of Detroit and spent her youth training as a dancer; her love for the body in motion still informs all of her work. She received her MFA in directing from UCLA, graduated from Brown with a BA in Art/Semiotics, and studied directing at Prague’s FAMU Film Academy. 

She’s currently working on a documentary about her Nana’s hallucination disorder and developing her feature YES NO HELLO GOODBYE, a magical realist story of a love triangle between a woman, her husband, and the female spirit inhabiting his body.

danaturken@gmail.com