Phillip Van

Phillip Van was raised in Honolulu, Hawaii and Portland, Oregon by his father, a Vietnamese refugee and his mother, a Greek American. He attended NYU’s Graduate Film Program at Tisch School of the Arts and lives in New York.

Phillip's films have screened around the world and won dozens of awards in festivals including the Berlin International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, HBO U.S. Comedy Arts Festival, Seattle International Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Aspen Shortsfest and Gen Art Film Festival, among others.

He is also the winner of a 2007 Student Academy Award, a BAFTA/LA Honorable Mention, Kodak's 1st Place Eastman Scholarship, and he was named one of Filmmaker Magazine's 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2007.

Based on his work, Phillip was chosen out of three thousand applicants to direct a short narrative film sponsored by the Berlin International Film Festival.

520 filmmakers from 101 countries voted on three finalists in the largest jury vote in the festival and Phillip's genre-bending film, High Maintenance, won the competition.

Ten thousand passengers on Delta Airlines flights voted on five award-winning films and High Maintenance was their top pick, garnering Phillip an awards package that included a screening and celebration in honor of his work at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival.

The film has gone on to win Grand Jury and Audience Awards at numerous festivals, and was the US winning entry and one of four films selected to screen in Kodak’s filmmaker spotlight at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.

Phillip is currently developing a feature adaptation of High Maintenance about sleep anomalies. He is represented by Bryan Besser at Endeavor and Rhea Scott at Little Minx, RSA.

While attending Cornell University as an undergraduate majoring in literature and film, Phillip was the youngest to work as a freelance ghostwriter and editor in film journalism for ABC Radio Entertainment, New York. During his two-and-a-half-year period at ABC, he interviewed acclaimed directors and actors Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Cameron Crowe, Tim Burton, M. Night Shyamalan, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Harrison Ford, John Travolta, Edward Norton, Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz and over one hundred others in one-on-one and junket forums.

He went on to work in research at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. For the last four years, Phillip has also worked as a cinematographer on over four dozen narrative shorts, commercials and industrials for independent production companies and clients such as Kenneth Cole, Macy's and Esquire. He shot a series of videos for Koch Records, the most recent a DVD for Ghostface Killah, featuring The Wu Tang Clan, released as a dual-disc set titled Put it On The Line and available at Virgin Megastores internationally. He trained with director Jim Sheridan's DP, Declan Quinn, ASC (In America, Vanity Fair).