Biography
For Jeremy Nielsen, the film program at Central Wyoming College is all about making movies and he puts cameras into the hands of his students the first day. Students focus on film production as well as critical studies.
Nielsen teaches his students the basics that are required in the production of a film, from writing to editing to directing. Students in his program will screen their films in an annual film festival.
Nielsen grew up in Salt Lake City and fell in love with making movies in junior high. Using his family home as a studio to crank out would-be box office hits, he began focusing on a more realistic pursuit and enrolled in the film program at the University of Utah. While he delayed his film career for several years to work in the music industry, he toured the country with a band.
He began working in the Salt Lake City film industry and taught courses at a juvenile detention center. He has since come along way since getting stabbed in the face at his first real job at the detention center.
Later he worked for a non-profit organization that worked with underserved youth through film education, this is where he discovered his love of teaching. He went back to school, earning a master’s degree; expanding his repertoire to include video game production. Nielsen continued in the film industry, working as a cinematographer, director of photography, editor, and as a composer of musical scores.
Nielsen had mined a life to tell stories that have resulted in produced feature films; Darkroom (dist. by Vanguard Cinema), as well as television pilots scripts; Ticker, which won best dramatic script at the New York Television Festival in 2018 and was a finalist at the Austin Film Festival that same year; and Devil’s Due which was selected in the Sundance Film Institute’s Episodic Lab in 2016 with his writing partner, Connie O’Donahue.
Read the story about the Sundance Institute’s Episodic Lab.
Read the story about the New York Television Festival.
Degrees
- Bachelor of Arts in Film Studies, University of Utah
- Master of Fine Arts in Film and Media Arts, University of Utah
Accomplishments
- Co-produced an award-winning film, Twice Today
- Co-produced an award-winning film, Darkroom (is now available on DVD.)
- Worked on movie sets
- Started a film festival at CWC
- Appointed to the Wyoming Film Industry Incentive Review Committee, a board of five which entices filmmakers to the Cowboy State by offering rebates of up to 15 percent of the cost of the project.
- Sundance Institute Episodic Lab Fellow, 2016.
- Winner Best Dramatic Script at the New York Television Festival 2018.
- Finalist for AMC Drama Teleplay Pilot at the Austin Film Festival 2018.
