About
Hi! As you may have already guessed, my name is Richard Needham. I’m a documentary producer, editor, and cameraman. Thanks for dropping in and welcome.
I trained in theater at Wake Forest University in North Carolina where I was lucky enough to learn from Maya Angelou, James Dodding, and Marcel Marceau, and, later, I moved on to film. I earned my M.F.A in film from the University of Miami School of Communications.
“What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”
— Jane Goodall
Early on I worked in music videos, commercials, and narrative films. Later, after working on Kevin Macdonald’s Academy Award-winning documentary, “One Day in September,” I began to work in the genre myself.
At Kevin’s suggestion, I produced a full-length documentary film of my own, “The Ticket,” which is about lottery winners and the people who surround them. Subsequent projects have included traveling to Mongolia 5 times to cover the impact of mining on nomadic cultures, saving the Tsaatan way of life, and to support the delivery of modern prosthetics to amputees in UlaanBaatar.
If anything sums up my work, perhaps it is that I like to discover and share “happenings,” spontaneous events that happen only once like acts of theater. There may be a plan in place but then having the opportunity to play around in real-time is very much where I feel at home. This is perhaps most encapsulated in the camera work that I do for artist Dara Friedman, whom I met in film school. At this point, I have worked on about 15 of Dara’s films, which have been exhibited around the world.