Photo by Robin Roemer
Carly Usdin is an award-winning commercial and narrative filmmaker based in Los Angeles. Her first feature, Suicide Kale, won the Audience Award for Best First Feature at Outfest 2016 and is now available on iTunes and Amazon Prime. Her short film, Misdirection, created through AFI’s Directing Workshop for Women, is currently on the festival circuit and is an official selection of over 50 film festivals worldwide.
In 2017 Carly served as showrunner and director for the scripted series Threads, produced by New Form for Verizon’s go90 platform. The 20-episode horror and comedy anthology series brought to life outrageous stories from internet forums like Reddit. Carly is also the creator and writer of two comic book series for BOOM! Studios: Heavy Vinyl and The Avant-Guards. Heavy Vinyl was nominated for a 2018 Prism award, honoring the best in LGBTQAI+ comics.
Carly has spent years making short-form narrative and branded content for clients like Funny or Die, CollegeHumor, Amy Poehler's Smart Girls, World of Wonder, CBS, Fullscreen, Astronauts Wanted, Portal A, TruTV, Viacom and YouTube. Most notably, she directed the third season of Awkwafina’s digital series Tawk, and her campaigns for RuPaul’s Drag Race have won a One Show Pencil and multiple Promax BDA Awards.
Carly was recently named to the 2019 cohort of Universal’s Directors Initiative. Currently she is developing several projects through her production company Scheme Machine Studios, which she owns with her wife, photographer and producer Robin Roemer.