Lydia Cornett is a Baltimore-born filmmaker currently based in Brooklyn, New York. As a former musician turned film director and composer, she makes work that explores the contours of labor, language and artistic expression across nonfiction and experimental forms. 

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Lydia is a 2021 Princess Grace Honorarium Winner, a 2018 Valentine & Clark Emerging Artist Fellow in the Jacob Burns Film Center’s Creative Culture program, and a 2017 UnionDocs Collaborative Studio Fellow. She has received support from the Tribeca Film Institute, IF/Then Shorts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Greater Columbus Arts Council.  

 

Her films have screened at Sheffield DocFest, AFI Fest, Slamdance, BAMCinemaFest, Aspen Shortsfest, Palm Springs International Short Fest, Hamptons International Film Festival, DOC NYC, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival, where she was awarded the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker in 2023. Her work has been distributed and featured by The New Yorker, PBS (POV and Reel South), Nowness, and Vimeo Staff Picks.

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Lydia graduated from Princeton University with a BA in history and received her MFA in Art from the Ohio State University. She is the co-founder of Cineseries, a graduate-student-led screening series at the Wexner Center for the Arts, and is an adjunct professor at The New School.