Ben Proudfoot
Ben Proudfoot is a two-time Academy Award® winning documentary filmmaker and the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Breakwater Studios.
Born in Nova Scotia, Canada in 1990 to an attorney father and sociologist mother, Proudfoot (a name of Scottish ancestry) was raised in a home that respected hard work and the transformative power of storytelling to inspire change and create a more just society. Steeped in the tall tales of salt-of-the-earth Atlantic Canadians while awed from afar by the showmanship, musicality and optimism of Spielberg and Disney movies on the family VCR, young Proudfoot had a passion to create that sense of wonder for others and wield storytelling for good.
As a teenager, he excelled as a sleight-of-hand magician, winning national and international titles for his craft and sparking in him a strong entrepreneurial spirit. Proudfoot saved money performing for children’s birthday parties and doing card tricks for tips at restaurants to pay his way to California to further his fledgling magic career. But early filmmaking efforts and behind-the-scenes DVD featurettes of the films of Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, and George Lucas painted such an irresistible picture of collaborative filmmaking that Proudfoot would end his path as solo magician to pursue admittance at the University of Southern California and devote his life to making movies.
Rejected from the school’s prestigious production program, Proudfoot moved to Los Angeles anyway and attended USC’s School of Cinematic Arts as a film history and theory student with the help of his family, student loans, and making corporate videos as a one-man band. Amidst the 2008 financial crisis and the internet’s upending of the film business, Proudfoot immersed himself in film craft and the origins of the studio system, studying alongside many of his future collaborators with whom he still works today. USC was also where, in 2011, he made his first short documentary as a class project, ink&paper, a 9-minute film about side-by-side letterpress and paper shops fighting to survive in Downtown LA. The film went viral on Vimeo and helped revive the struggling shops. That experience honed his belief in the power of the short documentary as cinema that, fueled by the internet, could entertain a mass audience and impel real-world change.
Upon graduation in 2012, Proudfoot founded Breakwater Studios in a modest building in Los Feliz where Walt Disney started his company in 1923. Breakwater (named after the protective seawall Proudfoot and his father built on the south shore of Nova Scotia) would be vertically integrated like the original film studios, housing all departments under one roof – but instead focus on producing short documentaries with excellence. With Hollywood favoring financing ten-part series over ten-minute films, Proudfoot innovated a brand funding model which, defying expectations, succeeded and supercharged the growth of the company, beginning a prolific decade for Proudfoot. He became a strong voice advocating for the advancement of short documentaries, which had a long history of being viewed as a second class, student format.
In 2016, Breakwater Studios partnered with Gigi Pritzker’s Madison Wells to further expand its brand partnership business. Film festivals including Tribeca, Sundance and Telluride began to notice Proudfoot’s work, which focused on elevating stories which have been ignored. A watershed partnership with The New York Times produced some sixteen collaborations with over 10 million views including A Concerto is a Conversation, which was nominated for Best Documentary Short Subject at the 93rd Academy Awards®, and The Queen of Basketball, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary Short Subject at the 94th Academy Awards®. The film, executive produced by Shaquille O’Neal and Stephen Curry, made history as the first Oscar win for The New York Times.
On March 10, 2024, Proudfoot became the first person born in the 1990s to win a second Academy Award®, this time for The Last Repair Shop, his second collaboration with composer and filmmaker Kris Bowers – and the first Oscar for The Los Angeles Times. The film was distributed by Searchlight Pictures, an arm of The Walt Disney Company, in a deal signed exactly a century after Walt Disney made his first deal at the same address. After winning the Oscar, the short documentary became the most searched-for title of any length on Disney+.
Ensuring his films also remain accessible for free on YouTube, Proudfoot views real-world impact as a film’s highest achievement, advocating for The Queen of Basketball’s Lusia Harris’ legacy as an unsung basketball pioneer, and inspiring a $15M capital campaign for the public school musical instrument repair facility in The Last Repair Shop. He also enjoys mentoring younger filmmakers and has executive produced short documentaries helmed by emerging voices including Whitney Skauge’s The Beauty President and Haley Watson and Rachel Greenwald’s Motorcycle Mary.
Today, Breakwater Studios has expanded to multiple studio facilities in Los Feliz, where Proudfoot proudly leads twenty full-time filmmaking staff producing original and commissioned documentaries with trusted partners like Google, LinkedIn, UNICEF, L’Oréal Paris, Charles Schwab, and Amazon.
Proudfoot, 33, resides in Los Angeles and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
