Filmmaker Garrett Bradley on creating work for ‘a more transparent, loving and just world’

The Oscar nominee, now represented by Prettybird, says her art is driven by one thing: empathy.

Feb 22, 2023 - 21:02

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Filmmaker Garrett Bradley on creating work for ‘a more transparent, loving and just world’

Ad Age is marking Black History Month 2023 with our third-annual Honoring Creative Excellence package. (Read the introduction here.) Today, our guest editor Kwame Taylor-Hayford turns the spotlight to artist and filmmaker Garrett Bradley.

“Garrett is second-to-none when it comes to storytelling that explores our humanity and society,” says Taylor-Hayford. “Channeling deep emotion and empathy, her work in film is widely awarded and celebrated. I’m excited to see her make a similar mark on the world of advertising.”

Bradley signed with production company Prettybird last summer, in the wake of countless accolades for her film work. Time Magazine, for instance, called Bradley’s “Time” (trailer below) one of “The 25 Defining Works of the Black Renaissance.” She received the Best Director for Documentary award at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival for “Time,” which was also nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 2021 Academy Awards.

Bradley’s work crosses over into the realm of fine art as well. She was the subject of a solo museum exhibition titled “Garrett Bradley: American Rhapsody” in 2019-2020 at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, where her films and multi-channel videos were shown. The exhibition traveled to Los Angeles, where it was on view at The Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art from December 2022 through earlier this month.

Her work is in the permanent collections of The New Orleans Museum of Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem and The Museum of Modern Art, among others.

For her contribution to Ad Age’s Honoring Creative Excellence package, Bradley offers the following brief statement about making work as “a call and response”—and also answers a few of our questions about inspiration:

Every project that I have had the privilege of making or working on has felt, in some way or another, like a call and response. The work being an attempt at a dialogue, an offering, a window. The great Bill T. Jones talks about the definition of art as being an attempt at making something worthy of an issue’s complexity. I’d like to think of myself as being committed to that same pursuit—committed, as Jones says, to the act of participating in a world of ideas and, in my mind, to the end of a more transparent, loving and just world.