The Bird Lot

VANESSA REISER is a filmmaker based in Austin. She graduated from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 1999, where she studied documentary films with the legendary filmmaker George Stoney, and was immediately hooked. Reiser spent the first part of her career as an editor, which has greatly informed her eye as a director and shooter of documentaries to create visually compelling stories. She is committed to making films that show the beauty in the vulnerability of the human experience, and has covered such topics as children born with rare diseases, the emotional healing process of incarcerated women, birthworkers, the people behind a hand-stitched soccer ball company in Colombia, and a spiritual Texas artist who finds the majesty of beauty in everything. Vanessa has worked for a wide variety of clients over the past 23 years , including L'Oreal, Lumos Pharma, the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, Tamron USA, Guru Bikes, ABC Insurance Trust, Hayworth Athletic, Skin is Skin, Headwaters School and Heart Gallery NYC. This is her second film about Parkinson's disease; the first was Empowered by Parkinson's, a film commissioned by Connecticut Public Television in 2019. She is currently working on a feature length documentary about a musical collaboration between two Austin, Texas artists. One is a composer for film and stage, and the other is an internationally-known jazz trumpeter - two long-time friends from two different sides of the world, different ethnicities, and two different genres of music, classical and jazz - who collaborate to create an Austin Symphony world premiere concerto for jazz trumpet and orchestra.