Market Road Films is a New York-based, independent production company founded in 2003 by 2-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage and PGA and Emmy Award-winning film director, Tony Gerber. The company’s mission is to bring evocative, visual and character-driven storytelling to unusual and otherwise untold stories. We work in both fiction, non-fiction, installation and podcast.
Our scope is international. Our concerns are universal.
Market Road Films is a minority and female-owned business, committed to inclusivity and diversity in both the stories we tell and the people we work with. Whether flying with bush pilots into war-torn regions of the Congo, embedding with Kurdish police fighting ISIS in northern Iraq, or traveling with former First Lady Michelle Obama to profile inspiring young women in Africa, Market Road Films will go anywhere to find stories that resonate across the globe.
We are a full-service production company. In addition to our character-driven, long-form work,
we have created music videos, commercials, museum installations and projections for downtown
and Broadway theatre.
Tony Gerber
Tony Gerber is an Emmy award-winning writer, producer and filmmaker. He has written and directed over a dozen documentaries for National Geographic, shot in some of the most remote and dangerous regions of the world. Most recently he directed and executive produced Kingdom of the White Wolf, a 3-part natural history series for National Geographic, filmed on location in the Canadian High Arctic. He is a producer of the critically acclaimed, PGA award-winning film Jane about the life and work of Dr. Jane Goodall. His documentary Explorer: Battle for Virunga, about the fight to protect mountain gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo (National Geographic Channel), was a 2017 recipient of a Genesis Award, the Humane Society’s top honor for bringing critical animal protection issues to the public. For CNN Films he directed, and co-wrote with Meryl Streep, We Will Rise chronicling former First Lady Michelle Obama’s trip to Africa to raise awareness of the importance of girl’s education, featuring Meryl Streep, Isha Sesay and Freida Pinto. The film was a recipient of an American Television Academy Honor and a Cine Golden Eagle. His independent films include Full Battle Rattle (Berlinale premiere and SXSW Special Jury Prize) and The Notorious Mr. Bout (Sundance, 2014). In 2005, Gerber co-founded NY-based production company, Market Road Films, with two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage. Nottage and Gerber are currently developing a feature film, Everlasting Yea! for Amazon Studios. In addition, Gerber is producing Emma Francis Snyder’s debut feature documentary Takeover! about the Young Lords 1970 take-over of the failing Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx, which made affordable healthcare a topic of national debate. The film is a recipient of support from Ford Just Films, HBO/IFP First Look and will be represented at IFP Independent Film Week, 2019. Gerber and Nottage are also Executive Producing Deep South, a 10-part podcast for Stitcher investigating an unsolved 1950s lynching and the conspiracy of silence in a small southern town. Gerber is an adjunct professor at the Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema at Steiner Studios.
Lynn Nottage
Lynn Nottage is a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and a screenwriter. Her plays have been produced widely in the United States and throughout the world. After a sold out run at The Public Theater her play Sweat (Premiered and commissioned, Oregon Shakespeare Festival American Revolutions Cycle/Arena Stage, winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize) is moving to Broadway. By The Way, Meet Vera Stark (Lilly Award, Drama Desk Nomination), Ruined (Pulitzer Prize, OBIE, Lucille Lortel, New York Drama Critics’ Circle, Audelco, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle Award), Intimate Apparel (American Theatre Critics and New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards for Best Play), Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine (OBIE Award), Crumbs from the Table of Joy, Las Meninas, Mud, River, Stone, Por’knockers and POOF!. She is currently developing a new play and multimedia performance installation based on two years of research and interviews conducted in Reading, PA. (w/ Oregon Shakespeare, Arena Stage & Labyrinth Theatre Company). In addition, she is working with composer Ricky Ian Gordon on adapting her play Intimate Apparel into an opera (commissioned by The Met/LCT). Over the years, she has developed original projects for HBO, Sidney Kimmel Entertainment, Showtime, This is That and Harpo.
Nottage is the recipient of a PEN/Laura Pels Master Playwright Award, Literature Award from The Academy of Arts and Letters, Columbia University Provost Grant, Doris Duke Artist Award, The Joyce Foundation Commission Project & Grant, Madge Evans-Sidney Kingsley Award, MacArthur "Genius Grant" Fellowship, Steinberg "Mimi" Distinguished Playwright Award, the Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner Award, the inaugural Horton Foote Prize, Helen Hayes Award, the Lee Reynolds Award, and the Jewish World Watch iWitness Award. Her other honors include the National Black Theatre Fest's August Wilson Playwriting Award, a Guggenheim Grant, Lucille Lortel Fellowship and Visiting Research Fellowship at Princeton University. She is a graduate of Brown University and the Yale School of Drama, where she has been a faculty member since 2001. She is also an Associate Professor in the Theatre Department at Columbia School of the Arts.
Nottage is a board member for Theatre Communications Group, BRIC Arts Media Bklyn, Donor Direct Action, Second Stage, The New Black Fest, and the Dramatists Guild. She recently completed a three-year term as an Artist Trustee on the Board of the Sundance Institute.
Taylor Hom
Taylor is a Chinese-American documentary film producer, writer, and journalist. Recently she created, wrote, and reported Unfinished: Deep South, a 10-part podcast that investigates the 1954 lynching of a wealthy African American farmer on the Arkansas Delta (Produced by Market Road Films and Stitcher). Unfinished was named one of the fifty best podcasts of 2020 by The Atlantic.
Taylor’s work focuses on topics of social justice and women’s issues. She has filmed across the U.S., Middle East and Africa, covering stories such as the Kurdish fight against ISIS in Northern Iraq, the theft of African American land in the Jim Crow South, the work of dissident journalists in Angola, and the role of women in the Arab Spring.
She has written and produced documentaries and branded content for National Geographic, HBO, NYTimes, PBS, CNN, CBS, Google, and Rolex. She is a 2017 recipient of Impact Partner's Producing Fellowship. A graduate of New York University’s honors program, she studied journalism, political economy, and Arabic.
Neil Shea
Neil Shea is a writer, filmmaker, and podcaster. His work regularly appears in National Geographic magazine, and he is co-creator with his partner, Taylor Hom, of the critically-acclaimed podcast Unfinished: Deep South. Neil's work often focuses on conflict, climate, and cultural change. His latest projects are set in the Arctic, and he's writing a book (Ecco, 2024) that explores the unprecedented transformation of the Arctic region, in all its gothic horror and wonder. Neil is a contributing editor with The Virginia Quarterly Review and The American Scholar, and he's a visiting professor of nonfiction at Sewanee, the University of the South.
Joy Sunday
Joy Sunday is an actor, writer, and film producer working between Los Angeles and New York. She works as an Associate Producer at Market Road films alongside piloting projects of her own. Joy made her music video-producing debut as a finalist in Los Angeles’ Music Video Festival with The Theory, and her film Beautiful Hair debuted with Tribeca, going on to win national merit & audience awards from arts initiatives such as YoungArts and the Scholastic Company. While attending USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, Joy worked at Fox Broadcasting, Paramount Studios, and the DeLaurentiis Company, finally graduating with honors with a degree in Cinema Studies.
Elisabeth Frankel
Elisabeth Frankel is a theatre-maker, dramaturg, producer, and teaching artist. As a playwright, she’s been a finalist for the Playwrights Realm Fellowship, Actors’ Theatre of Louisville Heideman Award, Columbia@Roundabout Reading Series twice, Jewish Plays Project, the Drama League’s Beatrice Terry Residency, PlayPenn Writers Conference, and a semi-finalist twice for the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference. Elisabeth has worked as a freelance assistant in both theatre and film, and her dramaturgical research has included projects for Amazon Studios, Fox Searchlight Pictures, and the Public Theater. As a teaching artist, she is the Co-Director and Head of Playwriting for CreateHER, a free theatre education program for female-identifying and non-binary high school students. Elisabeth received a BFA in Theatre Directing from the University of Michigan (Go Blue) and an MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University.
Laura Colleluori
Laura Colleluori likes helping smart, creative people make the things they want to make, whether in film, theatre, or community organizing spaces. She works as the Production Manager at Market Road Films, and occasionally collaborates with her friends at Open Stories Ensemble, Blue Otter Theatre, and Earth Complex. In her spare time, she organizes with her neighborhood mutual aid group, and with activists fighting to make universal healthcare a reality in New York. She holds a Bachelor of the Arts in Theatre Arts and Italian Studies from Dickinson College, and has completed additional training at Duke University, Yale University, the University of Bologna, and the Funny School of Good Acting.