About

Vanessa Haroutunian (she/they) is a queer producer, artist, and curator. Currently, Haroutunian is a Fellow in Women in Film’s inaugural Emerging Producers Program where she is working with Mentor Jeannette Volturno. Haroutunian is a producer at Big Think, a multimedia web portal building the world's biggest platform for ideas.

Haroutunian’s first producing experience was with Ira Sachs’ 2016 feature film Little Men which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won the Special Grand Prize at the Deauville American Film Festival. Haroutunian produced the short film “Flourish”, directed by Heather María Ács, which won Best LGBTQ Short at the Big Apple Film Festival in 2021, and screened at various festivals including Oscar-qualifying HollyShorts, OutFest Fusion, NewFest, London Shorts, and at BAM’s Programmers Notebook series. Ács and Haroutunian are in currently in development on a series entitled Radiant Flux which is a participant at the Gotham Week Film Market 2021 and for which Ács was selected as a Stowe Story Labs Writing Fellow in 2021. Haroutunian also produced the short film “Flock”, directed by Ariel Mahler, which is currently being developed into a feature with Haroutunian attached to produce. The feature screenplay of Flock was a finalist for Sundance’s Development Track & Diverse Voices’ 2021 Screenwriting Lab. In 2021, Haroutunian teamed up with co-creators Daquisha Jones and Ariel Mahler to produce a special season of the web series Bad Ally: Quarantine Chronicles. Haroutunian’s goal is to produce films that fill the gaps in the film industry, creating opportunities for diversity, inclusivity, and intersectionality in front of and behind the camera.

In addition to producing, Haroutunian has been working closely with Miranda July’s project Joanie4Jackie for the past decade, and made a documentary on the subject in 2010 called pure&magicalpussypower, for which she received the Jerome B. Hill Award for Documentary Excellence at Bard College. From 2013-2018 she was the Programs & Operations Coordinator at Queer|Art, where she currently manages the Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant. Haroutunian has curated a moving image program in conjunction with the Hammer Grant since its inception and in 2019 the program entitled “The Hammer Mix: Decades” screened at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).