Keith A. Bearden

Keith A. Bearden is an American Broadway performer, screenwriter, and director born in Middletown, Connecticut. His stage career began at age nine, and over the following decade he performed extensively in productions at Wesleyan University and Yale University, as well as acting and later teaching at The Oddfellows Playhouse. He attended the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, where he produced a body of comic and surreal short films in Super 8 and 16mm formats. Bearden currently resides in New York.

His Broadway career spanned from 2003 to 2010 and included appearances in Wicked and SIX: The Musical. Alongside his stage work, Bearden contributed journalism on film and filmmakers to publications including Movie Maker, Fangoria, The Seattle Weekly, Time Out NY, Slant, Psychotronic Video, and The Stranger. His interviews during this period featured directors and actors such as Werner Herzog, John Sayles, Jackie Chan, Paul Schrader, Kevin Smith, Dario Argento, Russ Meyer, Charles Durning, John G. Avildsen, Udo Kier, and Paul Morrissey.

Bearden co-wrote the 16mm short film The Raftman's Razor with Joel Haskard, producing it alongside Brooklyn-based producers Brad Buckwalter and Sharon Eagan. The seven-minute existentialist fable, centered on two small-town boys fixated on a largely inactive comic book superhero, premiered at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. It subsequently received awards at the Montreal Film Festival, Clermont-Ferrand, SXSW, the Seattle International Film Festival, and RES Fest, and was added to the permanent film collection of the Museum of Modern Art in 2009.

His debut feature, originally titled Miss January before a title change following resistance from Playboy Enterprises, was released as Meet Monica Velour. Starring Dustin Ingram, Kim Cattrall, and Brian Dennehy, the film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and received a four-city theatrical release in April 2011 through Anchor Bay Entertainment. Sony Entertainment distributed it on DVD and Blu-ray worldwide. Bearden's second feature, Antarctica, starring Chloe Levine and Kimie Muroya, was described as a surrealistic fable about growing up in America. It premiered at the Raindance Film Festival in November 2020 and was subsequently released on Amazon Prime and Apple TV.

Among his honors, Bearden has received Showtime's Tony Cox Award for Screenwriting, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Screenwriting, two Jerome Foundation Film and Video Grants, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Filmmaking in 2008.