Reb Braddock

Reb Braddock made his first movie in fifth grade with his dad’s Super 8 camera, a garage for a soundstage, and absolutely no idea that filmmaking was supposed to be difficult.

He’s been at it ever since.

Reb is a filmmaker, writer, educator, curriculum architect, and academic leader whose career has moved between movie sets and classrooms—two places where ambitious ideas collide with limited time, limited money, strong personalities, and the occasional minor catastrophe.

After working as a cinematographer, Reb wrote and directed Curdled, a darkly comic crime story that began as a short film and caught the attention of Quentin Tarantino. It was expanded into a feature produced through Tarantino’s A Band Apart and released by Miramax.

Then Reb discovered he loved teaching almost as much as making movies.

He regularly teaches Directing and Feature Filmmaking, working with emerging filmmakers at the intersection of story, performance, image, leadership, instinct, and the ability to make a decision when fifty people are staring at you waiting for one. His teaching has earned him two University Teaching Awards and a Graduate Mentor Award.

Reb also has a particular obsession with curriculum architecture—the belief that an education, like a good film, should have an arc. Courses shouldn’t simply accumulate toward a degree; experiences should build on one another, challenge students at the right moments, and ultimately help them discover their own creative voices.

Whether directing, teaching, designing curriculum, or leading a college, Reb is still basically doing what he did in that garage in fifth grade: gathering people and ideas together to make something that wasn’t there before.

The cameras are better. The problems are bigger. The garage occasionally looks suspiciously like a dean’s office.

But the mission remains the same:

Find a good story. Get the right people in the room. Make something worth watching. And whatever happens, don’t sell the Super 8 camera.