Nicole Franklin is an award-winning filmmaker whose credits include the feature length film I Was Made To Love Her: the Double Dutch Documentary (Sundance Channel, Numerous Festival Awards including Best Documentary at the Hollywood Black Film Festival), the short film The Double Dutch Divas! (Filmakers Library, Numerous Festival Awards including The Inspiration Award at the Riverrun Film Festival), and the television program Journeys In Black: The Jamie Foxx Biography (BET). Nicole produced, directed, wrote and edited all three productions. Currently Nicole is filming Meet BESS (formerly known as Gershwin, Norway and the Artists’ Libido: a Dialogue with Anne Brown), nominated for a 2005 IFP Gordon Parks Award for Directing ), which profiles the soprano who originated the role of Bess in Porgy and Bess and the actress for whom George Gershwin wrote the part. Principal photography is on location in Oslo, Norway. In the narrative world, Nicole was a director for one of the vignettes for the independent feature film Short Comings Humor in Orgasmic Proportions, a comedy about "smart sex". Nicole also directed and co-wrote with actor/writer/producer Peter Parros Harlem Sistas Double Dutch (WNET’s Reel NY X). This film is derived from her new feature length screenplay When Sistas Jump (Finalist, 2008 Sundance Screenwriters Lab), her fourth and final double Dutch film.
Nicole has also entered the world of commercials directing Harlem Brewing Company’s first Internet commercial for Sugar Hill Golden Ale, entitled The Quest.
In addition to film Nicole is directing theatre. Nicole directed the reading series at the famed New Federal Theatre as well as four of the 365 Plays/365 Days pieces of Suzan-Lori Parks for performances at both the Richard Allen Cultural Center for the Arts (RACCA) and The Public Theatre of New York. Nicole helmed the two character one-act Statues of Liberty by playwright Elisa Abatsis which premiered at the Impact Theatre’sWinter One Act Theatre Festival (Brooklyn, NY). In Time Square’s Sage TheatreNicole also directed a successful staged reading of Judy Chicurel’s play set on a New York City subway, Damon and Debra, starring Jas Anderson and Lorraine Bracco.
Nicole produced writer/director George Valencia’s award-winning short film Moment To Moment (Showtime Latino Filmmaker Award), writer/director Ruth Sergel’s Belle (Broadcast premiere on IFC, Tribeca Film Festival, Lake Placid Film Festival, Rhode Island International Film Festival, Woodstock Film Festival, Hamptons International Film Festival) as well as other short films that have gone on to competition in numerous festivals including Slamdance. Nicole is a director, an editor, a post production supervisor, a consulting producer on several upcoming documentaries, a guest speaker on the topic of women in film and travels to Brazil as a guest speaker on racial inclusion in cinema. She also trained as a director on the long-running soap opera As The World Turns. Nicole directs corporate videos and commercials, freelances as a digital cameraperson, and edits The Today Show and NBC Nightly News.
Nicole is an Adjunct Professor at New York University’s TISCH and was featured in the 2002 publication of the NY 411 Production Guide and its profile of women filmmakers in New York.As for affiliations past and present, Nicole’s associations include Producers Guild of America (PGA), Board Member of New York Women In Film and Television (NYWIFT), Independent Feature Project (IFP), Cinewomen NY, a Director in DnA (Directors and Actors workshop), DocuClub, The Black Documentary Collective (BDC), DV Republic, National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), National Association of Broadcast Technicians (NABET) and the actors’ unions SAG and AFTRA.