Biography

Two-time Oscar Nominated Writer-Director Bryan Buckley has been dubbed the "King of the Super Bowl" by the New York Times, having directed over 65 commercials for the big game since 2000. Many pieces of Buckley's work have been inducted into the Museum Of Modern Art's permanent collection and he is an esteemed recipient of the DGA award, multiple Emmy awards, and over 60 Cannes Lions - including two Grand Prix wins in 2019. A 2010 Adweek Readers Poll named Buckley the Commercial Director of the decade and he was also chosen as one of the 50 best Creative Minds in the last 25 years by Creativity Magazine. In 2022, Buckley won best director from the CLIOs, D&AD and One Show. Buckley's The Lost Class won Hungry Man Productions the title of best production company of 2022 at the CLIO awards and won a Titanium Lion from Cannes and an Emmy nomination for outstanding commercial.

After graduating at the top of his class from Syracuse University, Buckley plunged into the Ad business. By the age of 24 he started the company Buckley/DeCerchio with Tom DeCerchio. The brash young agency found their way to the front page of The New York Times Business section, being named one of "Advertising's Antic Upstarts." Their irreverent brand of humor for clients built the company into a $24 million dollar agency within two years and garnered every major advertising award from Cannes Lions to Clios.

Buckley's directing career started in 1994, when he directed the Emmy Award-winning "This is SportsCenter" Campaign. In 1997, Buckley co-founded Hungry Man Productions along with "This is SportsCenter" creator, Hank Perlman. By 2004, the company won the Cannes Festival's Palme D'or as the top commercial production company in the world and has finished in the top ten for more than ten consecutive years, the first production company to do so. Hungry Man has offices in New York, Los Angeles, London, Rio and Sau Paulo, and boasts an impressive roster of directors including Taika Waititi, Wayne McClammy, and Nanette Burstein.

In 2013, Buckley wrote and directed the short film Asad. The film was shot in Africa with an all Somali refugee cast, and screened at over 50 film festivals worldwide, taking top honors at the TriBeCa Film Festival and Michael Moore's Traverse City Film Festival, among others. The film was nominated for Best Live Action Short Film at the 85th Academy Awards. Archbishop Desmond Tutu said of the film: "They deserve two Oscars: One for creative endeavor, and the other for contributing to the collective understanding of our dependence on one another." Bryan returned to Africa for his second feature film, Pirates of Somalia, starring Oscar-winner Al Pacino, Evan Peters, Melanie Griffith, and Barkhad Abdi.

Buckley's first feature film, The Bronze, stars Melissa Rauch as a foul-mouthed former gymnastics bronze medalist who must fight for her local celebrity status when a new young athlete's star rises in town. The film was selected to open the 2015 Sundance Film Festival and made a splash in Park City as the breakout comedy of the festival, most notably with what Indiewire called, "one of the most hysterical sex scenes ever put on screen."

In 2020, Buckley received his second Academy Award Nomination for his short film, Saria. Based on true events, the film explores the unimaginable hardships young female orphans faced at the Virgen DE La Asuncion Safe Home in Guatemala in the days leading up to a tragic fire which claimed 41 of their lives in 2017. The film was shot on location in Mexico with participation of a cast of young actors from a local orphanage. After its release, the film received buzz among the activist community within Guatemala, with whom Buckley has stayed involved in the ongoing fight for justice for the 41 girls killed in the 2017 fire, whom the film is dedicated to. The film was cited by members of Congress in a 2020 letter to the Secretary of State. Congressmen Adriano Espaillat and Vicente Gonzalez stated the film "amplifies global awareness" of the issue, and demanded justice for the victims and an investigation into the whereabouts of the remaining survivors.

His activism work continued in 2021, when Buckley partnered with Parkland families as part of the Change the Ref campaign in support of gun control legislation. Creating a fake school, Buckley tricked former NRA president David Keene and gun-rights advocate and researcher John Lott into addressing a sea of empty chairs, representing children and teenagers who were shot and killed before they could graduate from high school. The work was covered by Rachel Maddow on MSNBC and covered across hundreds of media platforms. Now, in 2022, The Lost Class has impressively won four grand CLIO's, the Black Cube for Best of Show at the ADC awards, two Black Pencils from D&AD, Best of Show at The One Show and a Titanium at the Cannes Lions. Most recently, it was nominated for an outstanding commercial Emmy. Lost Class continues to garner accolades as it shouts an important message. In 2022, Buckley directed three more Super Bowl spots: Verizon with Jim Carrey and Geraldine Viswanathan, BMW with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Salma Hayek, and Toyota with Tommy Lee Jones, Rashida Jones, Leslie Jones, and Nick Jonas. The spots were all highly rated after the game, with Forbes naming BMW the "#1 most effective ad of the Super Bowl." This impressive track record has earned Buckley acclaim from the Cannes Lions Creativity Report, cementing his spot as a director of the year.

Buckley has teamed up with Change the Ref to create the NRA Children's Museum. In protest of pro-firearm lobbying following the Uvalde school shooting, the coalition built a mobile museum made of 52 empty school buses representing 4,368 children who lost their lives to gun violence in 2020. The buses feature an exhibit of artifacts, photos, videos, audio recordings, and personal memories of these children who have lost their lives to gun violence. The NRA Children's Museum has delivered its message to Senator Ted Cruz in Houston, with plans to continue its march against government officials who choose monetary and political gain over children's lives.

- IMDb Mini Biography By: Hungry Man