RUUN NUUR is a film programmer, writer, producer, and cultural strategist working across festivals, film institutions, artist development, and documentary practice.

She is currently the Documentary Programmer at the Vancouver International Film Festival, where she leads the Insights and Spectrum strands and curates international nonfiction cinema across the festival’s documentary program.

She formerly served as an International Features Programmer at the Cleveland International Film Festival, expanding her work across fiction, nonfiction, and global cinema. Her programming practice pays close attention to aesthetic form, political sensibilities, and activating audience engagement beyond the traditional Q&A. Across her work, Nuur has built a wide-ranging practice in nonfiction cinema that includes festival programming, film criticism, public conversation, artist support, project advising, and organizational leadership.

She has participated in major documentary and film spaces including Cannes Docs, Sheffield Doc/Fest, True/False Film Fest, New York Film Festival, Doha Film Institute, and others, serving as a programmer, speaker, moderator, consultant, juror, and industry participant.

Nuur is the co-founder of NO EVIL EYE CINEMA, a nomadic microcinema and cultural organization dedicated to film exhibition, education, and public programming. Through NO EVIL EYE CINEMA and its education initiative FILM FUTURA, she has helped build learning spaces for hundreds of emerging filmmakers, critics, programmers, and cultural workers, while developing a broader network of alumni, collaborators, and educators working across documentary, criticism, distribution, and film exhibition. As a writer and critic, Nuur has contributed essays, interviews, and criticism to Film Comment, Filmmaker Magazine, Documentary Magazine, DAZED, Hyperallergic, and other platforms. Her work as a writer extends from criticism and interviews to filmmaker profiles, festival coverage, and essays on nonfiction form, cultural memory, and contemporary film practice. Her work has been profiled in e-flux, POV Magazine, NYLON, The Brooklyn Rail, and scholarly journals.

She is the Creative Producer of the Field of Vision–commissioned documentary short They Won’t Call It Murder (2022), which screened at Sheffield Doc/Fest, BAMcinemaFest, Camden International Film Festival, AFI Fest, DOC NYC, and other festivals, and was selected as a Vimeo Staff Pick. Nuur has served on juries for Sheffield Doc/Fest and Indie Memphis and has been invited as a speaker, moderator, and industry participant across leading film festivals, markets, and institutions. Her practice combines curatorial judgment, editorial strategy, artist development, public speaking, and institution-building, with a focus on how films are discovered, contextualized, circulated, and sustained.

She was named a Fellow at the prestigious Flaherty Film Seminar, the 2022–24 Artist Residency Award Winner at the Wexner Center for the Arts and was the inaugural recipient of the Tejumola Olaniyan Creative Writers-in-Residence Fellowship. She is currently developing documentary and archival projects concerned with political history, memory, and African moving-image heritage.

Her CV is available upon request.

IDA’s Documentary Magazine - The Seat Between Them (digital - Janaury 2026)

Filmmaker Magazine- Inherited Histories: Cherien Dabis on All That’s Left of You (print edition - September 2025)

Film Comment Magazine - Interview: Geeta Gandbhir on The Perfect Neighbor (digital - October 2025)

Mubi/The Notebook- The Evolving Visual Multitudes of Ja'Tovia Gary

Wexner Center for the Arts - Cinema Revival: Exhibition as Activation

Artist Space - The Inherent Cinematic Transgression of Bill Gunn- print catalog for the exhibition, Till They Listen:  Bill Gunn Directs America

Kino Lorber - Hyenas (1992) Blu-Ray DVD booklet introduction

MUBI/The Notebook - When an Immigrant's Familial Bonds are as Foreign as the Land: Ekwa Msangi Discusses ‘Farewell Amor’

Hyperallergic - An Essential Watchlist of Groundbreaking Black Documentaries

PBS/Independent Lens - Rural Perspective on Mental Health Care in a Time of Crisis

Hyperallergic - Processing Mortality With Cinema

Hyperallergic - In Maine, a Space to Spur Change in Documentary

Hyperallergic -What Happened When a Filmmaker Asked Black Women Whether They Feel Safe

Reverse Shot - First Look 2019: Ambulante Más Allá

Wexner Center for the Arts - Examining‘Personal Problems’

The FADER - In a year obsessed with skating, this film is a true peek into the always-evolving subculture

Wexner Center for the Arts - Grace Jones & Jean-Michel Basquiat: Iconoclasts in motion

Film Comment - Interview: Khalik Allah for BLACK MOTHER

DAZED - The 2000s lesbian strip club party that helped define club culture today

Film Comment - The Night Walker *behind a paywall*

Hyperallergic -A History of Protest and Activism at the Oscars 

The Lily/Washington Post - These Black women are working to take down R. Kelly 

Wexner Center for the Arts - Soleil Ô and the expansion of the African image

Fandor - Love, Uninterrupted

Reverse Shot - First Look 2018: Taste of Cement

Filmmaker Magazine - Keeping Print Criticism Alive in the Digital Age 

afterHOURS - 10 subversive, feminist horror films to check out this Halloween

indieWIRE - Race, Religion, Immigration: 5 New Documentaries That Capture Our Divided Times 

i-D - where were all the female directors at the vmas?

Okay Africa - ‘Your Story Matters:’ Heidi Saman’s Blueprint to Making a Successful Debut Feature

MUBI - Women in Revolt: An International Women's Day Film Syllabus 

Real Life Magazine:

1) Defending Your Life
2) Body Cam

Media Diversified - Angela Bassett, the genius that defies age

TIFF/The Review - Med Hondo is the African Auteur You Need to See 

Little White Lies - Is Western cinema ready to challenge Muslim stereotypes? 

cléo journal - Permission, Power, and Privilege: An Interview with Kirsten Johnson

• Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media: Making a Home for Film, Making Film a Home: The Nomadic Cinephilia of Ruun Nuur (fall 2021, print academic journal) 

• Filmmaker Magazine: A Colander in the River of the World: On Decolonizing Film Studies (summer 2021, digital)

• Hyperallergic: Radical Migration Stories on the Road (summer 2019, digital)

• Interview Magazine: The five underground zines you should check out (digital, spring 2018)

• Nylon: 5 SOMALI CREATIVES ON HOW SURVEILLANCE CULTURE SHAPES THEIR WORK (spring 2018, digital)

• Brooklyn Rail: NO EVIL EYE Ingrid Raphael and Rooney Elmi with Gina Telaroli (summer 2019, digital)

• MovieMaker Magazine: The 25 Coolest Film Festivals in the World 2020 (summer 2020, print and digital)

Columbus Alive: Community feature: Local publication makes room for unheard voices in film criticism (spring 2018, print and digital)

Co-Founder of NO EVIL EYE CINEMA 

NO EVIL EYE is a nomadic micro-cinema that aims to redefine the creative and social parameters of film scene(s) by curating an eclectic mix of films and accessible educational workshops made for and by inclusive audiences. 

Since our launch in May 2019, we’ve been invited to engage in a variety of unique spaces and places including institutions, film festivals, underground theaters, and DIY organizations around the country. 

Our mission is to reimagine the traditional filmic experience by promoting a realistic yet utopian vision of cinema as a space of socio-political possibilities. We’re interested in igniting a collective radical imagination around the moving image that moves beyond the status quo.

Founder and Managing Editor of SVLLY(wood) Magazine

An irregular print and digital movie magazine geared toward curating a radical cinephilia. Currently on hiatus due to funding.  

SVLLY(wood) published three issues during its tenure and was read around the world. Mentions from Filmmaker Magazine, Interview Magazine, and more.

‍ ‍INVITED SPEAKER

• Cannes Doc - Marché du Film

• Columbus Museum of Art 

• Doha Film Institute

• New York Film Festival

• Wexner Center for the Arts

• Another Gaze 

• New Orleans Film Festival

• True/False Film Festival

• Museum of the Moving Image 

• Images Film Festival

• Lafayette College: Film and Media Studies Lecturer  

• Melbourne International Film Festival

‍ ‍INVITED JURY MEMBER

Mosquers Film Festival (2025)  -------- Shorts Film Jury

Brown Girls Doc Mafia (2025)  -------- Sustainable Artist Fellowship

Cleveland International Film Festival (2023) -------- New Direction Competition Jury 

Sheffield Doc/Festival (2018) -------- New Talent Jury 

Indie Memphis Film Festival (2018) -------- Indie Grants Jury and Black Filmmaker Residency and Fellowship.

The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (2017) -------- Judge for the Short Form Fiction at the 53rd Annual Ohio Valley Regional Emmy® Awards

Untitled Doc Feature

Title: Writer-Producer-Director

Status: In-Production

Profiling the many cycles of making and unmaking of a lost film and the nation that produced it.

They Won’t Call It Murder (2022) dir Ingrid Raphaël and Melissa Gira Grant

Status: Available to watch

Title: Producer

Bound by grief, five women in Columbus, Ohio reclaim the voices of their loved ones from the police who killed them. Together, they confront the impossibility of receiving justice from a system which has stolen the lives of their family members.

GLOBAL RELEASE: Vimeo Staff Pick 2022
WORLD PREMIERE: Sheffield Doc/Fest 2021
US PREMIERE: BAMcinemafest 2021

Official Selection: 
Camden International Film Festival 2021
AFI Festival/Meet the Press 2021
the opening night film of Unorthodocs Documentary Film Festival 2021
DOCNYC 2021

• Documentary Producing & Directing

• Somali Cinematic Scholarship

• Curriculum and Education Design

• Teaching & Original Workshops 

• Film Programming

• Creative Nonfiction

• Documentary Film Criticism 

• Radical, Alternative, and Political Cinemas

• Black/African Diasporic Cinemas

• Restoration and Cinematic Preservation of Global South Cinemas

• Muslims and Islam in Media Theory  

• Communication Design and Direction

Flaherty Film Seminar Fellows in New York City, NY

• Curatorial Fellowship (Summer 2025)

Sundance Institute in Park City, Utah 

• Press Inclusion Initiative (2019-20, 2024, 2025) 

Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio  

• Artist Residency Award (2023-24)

The Africa Institute in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates 

• Tejumola Olaniyan Creative Writers-in-Residency Fellowship Award (Sept-Nov 2022) 

International Documentary Awards (IDA) in Los Angeles, California 

• Best Short-Form Series for Field of Vision

Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio 

• Film/Video Studio Residency (Fall 2021) 

Film at Lincoln Center in New York, NY

• New York Film Festival’s annual Critics Academy (Sept-October 2017)

ruuntheenuur[at]gmail[dot]com

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