Matthew Puccini

Puccini grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2015, while attending New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, he made his first film as writer and director, Solo, which starred Tommy Nelson and Matthew Mindler. It earned Puccini the King Award for Screenwriting at NYU’s First Run Film Festival and won the 2017 Golden Reel Award for Best Student Film at the Tiburon International Film Festival.[7][8]

After graduating from NYU that year, he went to work for “an extremely demanding producer,” in order to make his next film, The Mess He Made, which showed the experience of waiting for the results of an HIV test through the eyes of a man, played by Max Jenkins.[9][10] The film premiered at SXSW in 2017, where it became a finalist for the Iris Prize. That same year, Puccini became a member of the 2017 New York Film Festival Artist Academy, a Richie Jackson Fellow at Tisch School of the Arts and a Creative Culture Fellow at the Jacob Burns Film Center. He then produced two more short films, Stumped and Marquise, the latter of which was acquired for streaming by Topic Studios.[11]

In 2018, Puccini was named a Sundance Ignite Fellow.[12] This and the successes of his films gave Puccini enough leverage to create a Kickstarter campaign in order to fund Lavender, which he then produced later that year, starring Michael Hsu Rosen, Ken Barnett and Michael Urie. The film was nominated for both Sundance's Short Film Grand Jury Prize and Vimeo’s Best Drama of 2019, and won the Here Media Award for Best Queer Short Film at the Provincetown International Film Festival.[13]

His most recent film, Dirty, premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Jury Award for Best Short Film, and then screened virtually at SXSW, in which the physical screening was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.[14][15] However, the film still got nominated there for the Grand Jury Award for Narrative Short and received a Special Jury Award for the performances of the film's two stars, Manny Dunn and Morgan Sullivan.[16][17] It then went on to play at BFI Flare, Outfest Fusion, Atlanta Film Festival and the Palm Springs ShortsFest.[18][19] In October 2020, the film's streaming rights were acquired by The Criterion Channel.[20]

Puccini, as of now, lives in Los Angeles, and is currently in development on his first feature film and in post-production on the short documentary, Queer/Elder, which will be released in 2021.[21]

• Matthew Puccini at IMDb
• Matthew Puccini Mubi
• Matthew Puccini website