About Cambria Matlow
Cambria Matlow is a film director, writer and editor based in Portland, OR. In moody storyworlds that disrupt and discomfort, Matlow uses the mirror of nature to illuminate fractured identities, broken systems and complicated relationships.
An IFP Documentary Lab Fellow, Southern Circuit Tour Fellow and winner of Oregon Film + Playa’s Screenwriting Award, her Jury and Audience award-winning documentaries No More Dope Parties (2019), Woodsrider (2017) and Burning In the Sun (2010) have been selected for IFP’s Independent Film Week, broadcast on Al Jazeera and PBS, released through distributors Cinema Libre, Bullfrog Films and Uncorked Entertainment, and screened in festivals and cinemas worldwide including New York’s Lincoln Center and Santa Barbara Int’l Film Festival. Grants and residencies include Playa, Signal Fire, LEF Foundation, Brooklyn Arts Council, Experimental Television Center, Puffin Foundation, and Regional Arts and Culture Council.
Her films have been described as “hauntingly beautiful” by Willamette Week and ”relaxing and contemplative” by the Los Angeles Times. Her creative process is inspired by natural and urban landscapes, motherhood and domesticity, plant medicine, her Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry and Los Angeles childhood, rituals and magic, radical environmentalism, community systems of care, truthtelling and performance, small acts, and the spaces between lines.
Why Dig When You Can Pluck (2024) marks her narrative debut as a writer/director and premiered in competition at BAFICI.
Projects in development include a doc about identity and loss within her mixed-race LA-based family, a Western/coming-of-age narrative centered on teenage Mexican sisters set in the Oregon high desert of 1850, and a contemporary feminist stoner environmental noir. She just started UC Riverside’s Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts.
Matlow has taught filmmaking courses at NW Film Center, Open Signal and Camas High School, and from 2017-2019 led Film Fatales’ Portland chapter. She holds a Certificate in Film Production from Burlington College in Vermont and a B.A. in Hispanic Studies from Columbia University. She lives in SE Portland with her cinematographer husband Ben, their son Forrest, perfect pitbull mix Vida and Toothless the bearded dragon.
