Gyula Gazdag is a director of film, theater, and television, and has served as the artistic director of the Sundance Filmmakers Lab since 1997. Born in Budapest, he earned an MFA in 1970 from the Hungarian Academy of Drama, Film, and Television, where, in the 1990s, he served as head of the film and television department. From 1993 to 2015, he was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles’s School of Theater, Film, and Television. There he was instrumental in creating a new production program. Gazdag has been a creative advisor at the Maurits Binger Film Institute, in Amsterdam, since 2002, and at the Script Station of the Berlinale Talents since 2006.

Gazdag’s numerous feature films include A Hungarian Fairy Tale (1987), which won the Special Jury Prize at the Locarno Film Festival and was named one of the year’s Ten Best Films by the Village Voice and Best Feature Film by the Hungarian Film Critics Awards. A Hungarian Fairy Tale screened at twenty film festivals worldwide, including the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. His other films include Stand Off (1989), which won a Special Jury Prize at the San Sebastián International Film Festival; Lost Illusions (1983), named Best Screenplay by Hungarian Film Week; and The Whistling Cobblestone (1971), named Best First Feature by the Hungarian Film Critics Awards. His documentaries include A Poet on the Lower East Side: A Docu-Diary on Allen Ginsberg (1997), Hungarian Chronicles (1991), Berlinale Forum entrant Package Tour (1985), The Banquet (1982), and The Resolution (1972), named one of the best 100 documentaries of all time by the International Documentary Association. For the stage, he has directed Candide, The Bald Soprano, The Abduction from the Seraglio, The Tempest, Tom Jones, and The Hothouse, among others.