AMARA UNTERMEYER

Amara Untermeyer is a commercial director, documentary filmmaker and video artist. Texas-born and raised, she spent the next two decades making a life in NYC and California, eventually trading city streets for Southern California’s mountains, desert and surf - places that left their mark on both her eye and her appetite for the wild. She likes fast horses, complex humans, and ethereal light.

Her work moves between cinematic automotive, celebrity, performance and lifestyle, and documentary storytelling. She’s equally at home hanging out of a camera car, building vibrant worlds on a soundstage, or cultivating the unguarded in people who have spent their lives in front of cameras. Recent work includes films with Emmy award winning Mariska Hargitay, NFL’s Jay Glazer, and directed campaigns for General Motors, Cadillac, Lexus, Ford, Oracle, Amazon, Blue Cross Blue Shield among others.

Long before celebrity holding rooms and precision driving, Amara was hauling cameras through Haiti, Indonesia and El Salvador, working alongside human-rights advocates, trafficking survivors and communities rarely given control of their own narratives. She’s filmed adventure programming for The History Channel, embedded for months inside America’s largest sober high school, developed an adventure documentary series with Viola Davis as Executive Producer, and ridden Indonesian racehorses bareback.

That mileage still informs everything she directs. Amara brings documentary instinct to highly crafted commercial worlds, looking for the thing between the lines: the unscripted beat, the sideways glance, the surreal interruption.

She believes the people making the work matter as much as the work itself. She leads with integrity, curiosity and a loud laugh, and likes sets where crew, agency, client and talent are all pulling toward the same idea.

She likes bold images. But mostly she loves the people in them.