Bryan Buckley

Bryan Buckley may not have the name recognition of Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg, but he very well might have earned the largest audience of any director: he was responsible for dozens of Super Bowl commercials starting in the year 2000. Although Buckley was most prolific in the world of small screen advertising, he found a good deal of success in the cinematic realm as well, most notably for his short film "Asad" (2012), for which he earned an Academy Award nomination. Bryan Buckley was born September 3, 1963, in Sudbury, Massachusetts. He began a career in commercial film work in 1994, pioneering his pursuits with ESPN's acclaimed "This Is SportsCenter" campaign. Following Buckley's direction of sports mockumentary "The New Jersey Turnpikes," which was shot in 1999 but never released in theaters, he continued ad work through the early 2000s before tacking short features like "Krug" (2004) and "The Wake-up Caller" (2004) onto his resume. Not long after, Buckley would collaborate with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates on the comedic short film "New Family" (2008), itself a campaign for Microsoft. Two years later, Buckley developed his first documentary project, "No Autographs" (2010), which chronicles the experiences of a Sudanese refugee. This socially conscious ideology would carry through to Buckley's next piece. "Asad" (2012) is a short film about a Somali boy who finds himself at the crossroads of taking to a life of piracy. The film earned Buckley an Academy Award nomination for Best Short Film. Finally, after a 15-year-long hiatus from feature direction, Buckley returned to the game to helm "The Bronze" (2015): a comedy/drama about a decorated gymnast striving to reclaim her former glory in the wake of a new champion's arrival into her life. The film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 2015.