Filmmakers

NEAL HUTCHESON is an Emmy award winning documentary filmmaker living in Raleigh, North Carolina. A graduate of the film studies program at North Carolina State University he worked as a producer of educational materials while pursuing film projects on the side. He began to work in documentary form with observational projects on Super8 film, including a short piece featuring the work of outsider artist Vollis Simpson. In the 1990s he began to collaborate with linguist Walt Wolfram at NC State University on a series of documentaries on the interplay of language, culture and identity, including Indian By Birth - The Lumbee Dialect, Mountain Talk, The Carolina Brogue, Voices of North Carolina, First Language - The Race to Save Cherokee (with Danica Cullinan) and Talking Black in America (with Danica Cullinan). Other cultural documentaries include The Queen Family - Appalachian Tradition and Back Porch Music and Coresounders - Living from the Sea. Hutcheson founded Sucker Punch Pictures to produce films on other topics, including an adaptation of Gary Carden’s play The Prince of Dark Corners, and documentaries The Outlaw Lewis Redmond, The Last One - Moonshine in Appalachia, and Popcorn Sutton - A Hell of a Life.

Hutcheson is also producing documentary films for Kirk French's CORVA (Community Oriented Research in Visual Anthropology), including Emmy nominated Tierra y Agua, The Coast Salish Woolly Dogs, and the forthcoming A Century After Nanook.

Among other honors, Hutcheson has been the recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship, the Brown-Hudson Folklore Award, the North Carolina Filmmaker Award, and regional Emmys for The Last One, First Language, and Talking Black in America.  His work has been featured on PBS, Documentary Channel, History Channel, Discovery Channel, A&E and Sundance.