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Chris J. Russo is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and artist whose work focuses on social issues, outlier stories, and marginalized communities. Her feature film, Lady Buds, which she directed and produced, chronicles six courageous women as they come out of the shadows of the cannabis underground to enter California’s legal market. The film received critical acclaim after premiering at Hot Docs in 2021, winning Best Documentary at the Mill Valley Film Festival and the Audience Award for Best of the Festival at the San Luis Obispo Film Festival. Picked up by Gravitas Ventures, it had a theatrical release in 2021 and a broadcast release in 2022 and can currently be streamed on Starz, Amazon, and AppleTV+.

 

Chris also Co-Executive Produced Beyond the Aggressives for Showtime, which won the 2024 GLAAD Documentary Award. Her short films have screened at the Sundance Film Festival and across hundreds of festivals worldwide. She is a fellow of the Sundance Institute/Women In Film Financing Intensive as well as Film Independent’s Director and Screenwriter Labs with both Lady Buds and her project Directed By Dorothy Arzner, a biopic about the rise and fall of the little-known Golden Era Hollywood lesbian starmaker-director. Notable shorts include A Woman Reported (2004), about the moments before a hate crime occurs; Size 'em Up (2002), a coming-of-age tale; and Straight Down The Aisle: Confessions of Lesbian Bridesmaids (2000), which won the Outfest Best Short Documentary Award for its exploration of marriage non-equality.

 

In addition to filmmaking, Chris’s fine art photographs have been exhibited in various galleries across Los Angeles, showcasing her visual storytelling beyond the screen. She divides her time between her own creative projects and working as a Post Production Supervisor on feature films, TV series and digital content. Her unscripted credits include the culturally diverse cooking show, Not Like Mama, starring Tia Mowry for FilmRise, My Road to WOW, a docuseries profiling the amazing women wrestlers of the all-female franchise for Paramount, Citizen McCain, a digital talk show featuring political commentator Meghan McCain, and a series of digital culinary shows for Gordon Ramsay Productions and Fox Television.  

Chris began her Hollywood career at Kodak as a film imaging expert working alongside cinematographers, later transitioning to ARRI as a digital imaging expert. With a solid foundation in both production and post production, she offers a seasoned perspective on the creative and technical evolution of storytelling in Hollywood, but her passion for the creative process remains at the heart of her work. Her latest project is a new documentary tentatively titled, Big Dad Energy, which celebrates the first-of-its-kind comedy show featuring transmasculine comedians.