Yahoo News ‘Fancy Dance’ Director Erica Tremblay Signs With CAA (Exclusive)
Erica Tremblay, the Native American filmmaker who made her directorial debut with the Sundance title Fancy Dance, starring Lily Gladstone of Killers of the Flower Moon fame, has signed with CAA for representation.
The filmmaker, from the Seneca-Cayuga Nation, worked on FX series Reservation Dogs as a writer and director. Tremblay saw Fancy Dance, after a year’s delay, get picked up by Apple Original Films after its Sundance premiere and ahead of a release in theaters and on Apple TV+ later this year.
More from The Hollywood Reporter
Set in northeastern Oklahoma’s Indian Country, Fancy Dance is based on Tremblay’s original screenplay co-written with Miciana Alise and centers on a young woman’s disappearance from a reservation and her family’s urgent attempts to locate her.
In Nov. 2023, Tremblay and Alise co-wrote a guest column for The Hollywood Reporter talking about the film’s struggle to find distribution. “Our film premiered in the same year as Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. Both films star Lily Gladstone, are set in Oklahoma and deal with themes surrounding settler violence against Native peoples. As first-time indie filmmakers, we were under absolutely no illusion that Fancy Dance would receive the same kind of industry support as Mr. Scorsese’s juggernaut, but the disparity is so great that it renders our film virtually invisible and leaves only one available perspective: the non-Native one,” the filmmakers wrote.
Tremblay is currently writing for season three of AMC’s Dark Winds, while also serving as a supervising producer and directing an episode. She also worked as a co-producer on Reservation Dogs, for which she directed her first and second TV episodes for seasons two and three.
And Tremblay developed a series adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Yellowbird for Paramount+, alongside Sterlin Harjo. She was recently named a Sundance Momentum Fellow and presented the inaugural Jaya Award from Barnard College’s Athena Film Festival.
In 2021, Tremblay was accepted into the Sundance Directors and Screenwriters Lab, and was awarded the Walter Bernstein Screenwriting Fellowship, the Maja Kristin Directing Fellowship, the SFFILM Rainin Grant, and the Lynn Shelton of a Certain Age Grant.
She continues to be represented by Ragna Nervik Management and Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz.
Best of The Hollywood Reporter
