Rob Tregenza

Professor

Rob Tregenza

Cinema Program

Contact Info

Rob Tregenza is an internationally recognized director, producer, editor, and cinematographer. He has written, directed, and photographed four independent feature films that have screened at the Cannes Film Festival in the “Un Certain Regard,” and the Berlin Film Festival in the “Panorama” official section. Over the years, these features have also appeared at other festivals such as Toronto, Sundance, Rotterdam, and Edinburgh. He received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1982 on “Martin Heidegger and the Film-event”.

His most recent award-winning feature film Gavagai was shot in 35mm motion picture film in Norway and released theatrically in 2018.  It earned the #5 spot on Metacritic’s top films of 2018. It was also ranked at number 54 by Metacritic of the top 100 feature films of the past decade.

It is presently available VOD worldwide on Amazon, Apple, and Google. Tregenza’s directorial work has been enthusiastically reviewed in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Village Voice, Hollywood Reporter, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times and in the international press and by prominent critics such as Vincent Canby, Dave Kehr, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and Roger Ebert.

In 1999, a retrospective of his feature films was shown at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. Perhaps the highest recognition of Tregenza’s work comes from one of the most important European directors of the 20th century, Jean-Luc Godard, who hand-selected Tregenza’s Talking to Strangers to screen at Toronto in 1996. 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 sur Rob Tregenza” (Five Letters to and About Rob Tregenza) may be found in the book Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, published in 2006 by the modern and contemporary art institution Le Centre Pompidou. In the 1990s, as the president of Cinema Parallel, Tregenza distributed feature films by Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, Dorota Kedzierzawska, Bela Tarr, Michael Haneke, Karel Kachyna, and Laetitia Masson.

In addition to feature filmmaking, Tregenza’s award-winning career as a commercial director and cameraman for clients such as IBM, DuPont, CSX, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and numerous non-profits; as well his cinematography for other filmmakers such as Claude Miller, Bela Tarr, and Alex Cox, allowed him to shoot extensively in Africa, South America, Asia, Eastern Europe, Spain, and the United Kingdom.