Rob Tregenza
Director, Cinema Program
325 N Harrison Street | PO Box 842519 | Richmond, VA 23284-2519
(804) 828-2787
cinema@vcu.edu

Rob has written, directed and photographed three award-winning independent feature films, films that have been screened at the Cannes Film Festival in the "Certain Regard" category and the Berlin Film Festival in the Panorama section. Over the years, his films have also appeared at the festivals of Toronto, Sundance, Rotterdam and Edinburgh.

His work has been positively reviewed in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times and by such prominent critics as Vincent Canby, David Kehr, Jonathan Rosenbaum and Roger Ebert. A retrospective of his feature films was shown at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. in 1999. But perhaps the highest recognition has been the attentions of one of the most important European Directors of the 20th Century, Jean-Luc Godard, who hand-selected Tregenza's Talking to Strangers to screen again at the 1996 Toronto International Film Festival. Godard describes passages in Tregenza's films as, "remarkable and at times astonishing, that is, softly imbued with the marvelous." He further explains that in Tregenza's cinematic world, "reality walks hand in hand with fiction."

The essay, "Cinq Lettres a et et sur Rob Tregenza" (Five Letters to and about Rob Tregenza) appears in the book Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, published in 2006 by the modern and contemporary art institution of Paris, Le Centre Pompidou. Tregenza has also had an award-winning career as a television commercial director and cameraman for clients like IBM, DuPont, CSX, Blue Cross Blue Shield and numerous non-profits and has worked as a Director of Photography for other independent filmmakers such as Bela Tarr and Alex Cox.

Rob has shot extensively in Africa, South America, Asia, Eastern Europe, Spain and the United Kingdom. He received his PhD from UCLA and is Founder and Director of the Tampa International Film Festival.