Tânia Cypriano has been working between the United States and her native Brazil for over twenty-five years. Her most recent feature documentary, Born to Be, which follows the work of Dr. Jess Ting at New York’s groundbreaking Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery, was nominated for 2021 News & Docs Emmy awards for Best Feature and Outstanding Direction.
Her films and videos have won international awards including Best Documentary at the Joseph Papp’s Festival Latino, the Pan African Film Festival, Fespaco in Burkina Faso, Festival do Cinema Brasileiro de Gramado in Brazil, and Best Documentary Feature & The Human Spirit Award at the Nashville Film Festival.
They have also been shown around the world in places such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Hong Kong Arts Center, the Jerusalem Film Festival, the Amsterdam Documentary Film Festival, and the Berlin International Film Festival. Her television credits include working on documentaries for PBS, the History Channel, NHK in Japan, GNT in Brazil, and Channel 4 in England.
Tania has also been a grant recipient from the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Soros Documentary Fund, the Jerome Foundation, Experimental Television, the National Latino Communication Center and the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment and the New York Foundation for the Arts - the inaugural “Made in NY” Women’s Film, TV & Theatre Fund.
She has served on productions for Bill Moyers, Martin Scorsese and Nelson Pereira dos Santos. She has also co-organized film series with MoMA, Anthology Film Archives, the Museum of Image and Sound in São Paulo, and the Grazer Kunstverein in Austria. She is a co-founder of the Brazilian Filmmakers Collective and presently directs the Films Fellowship Program at the Bronx Documentary Center.