20-21 Sep 2024

20th ​New York City Short Film Festival

About

​

The NEW YORK CITY SHORT FILM FESTIVAL (NYC SHORTS) is an international short film festival dedicated to the short form. We will celebrate our 20th annual edition in 2024 in a hybrid format with in-person and virtual screenings.


We hope that this year's festival screenings will once again take place at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre at Symphony Space, a storied arts and film venue in Manhattan.

NYC SHORTS is a juried festival with winners in each of seven categories:  Drama Short, Comedy Short, Documentary Short, Animation Short, LGBT Short, Foreign Language Short and Student Short.  The audience votes for its favorite film in each screening for the audience awards.  In our 20-year history, we have screened shorts from all over the world and had filmmakers in attendance from the US, UK, Australia, Germany, Mexico, South Africa, Israel, Canada, Italy and more.  Attending filmmakers participate in a post-screening Q&A and network with other filmmakers and industry guests at our after-party. 


Our Official Selections have gone on to screen at Sundance, Berlin, Clermont-Ferrand and many other important film events.  In 2007, the animated short The Danish Poet won the Academy Award for Animated Short after it had its New York premiere at our festival in 2006.  In 2018, our Best Foreign Language Short May Day had its US Premiere at our festival and was later short-listed (top ten) for the 2019 Academy Award.  Madre, our 2018 Best Drama Short was nominated for the 2019 Academy Awards in the live-action category.  2021 Audience Award winner Affairs of the Art​, was nominated for the 2022 Academy Awards in the animation category.

The festival was founded in 2005 by filmmakers David Barba, James Pellerito and Jennifer Pellerito.


2023 Festival Programming Team

Kevin Fentress

Lingxi Li
Peter Loiselle
Daisy Macias
Sarah Marzouk
Hazel Oh
Owen Stone
Tianyu Yang


​2022 Festival Programming Team
Ruthie Baker

Daniel Cooley

Kevin Fentress

Sarah Marzouk

Kheyal Roy-Meighoo

2021 Festival Programming Team

Ruthie Baker

Adam Heckman

Alexis Jenkins

Tianyu Yang


2020 Festival Programming Team

Hope Chang
Haley Grissett
Adam Heckman
Jake McClain
Kamryn Olds
Murphy Powell
Rachel Singh
Presley West
Tianyu Yang