About

Vera Anderson has been a photographer for more than twenty-five years. Working mostly within the Hollywood community, her photographic credits include personalities as diverse as Madonna, Jack Nicholson, Angelina Jolie, Johnny Depp and Jimmy Carter, as well as corporate clients such as Elizabeth Arden, Miller Beer and the L.A. Lakers. Additionally working as the Los Angeles Bureau Chief of Cine Premiere Magazine (Mexico) since 1994, Anderson has also become well-known for her monthly Hollywood column and personal interviews with celebrities such as Al Pacino, Sean Penn, Julia Roberts and Sheryl Crowe.

For her photographic essays about domestic violence, she is a recipient of the Barbara Deming Money for Women Award and has been featured on CNN’s World News Tonight and The Today Show. Her first book, A WOMAN LIKE YOU: The Face of Domestic Violence, a collection of her interviews and portraits of survivors of domestic violence and women incarcerated for killing their abusers, was excerpted in The Utne Reader and won the prestigious 1998 Small Press Book Award.

It may seem a stretch from there to indie filmmaking, but in fact it’s just another expression of Vera’s desire to tell stories through images. Working with her writer-director partner Paul Duran, she produced the low-budget feature film THE DOGWALKER, which – after a successful festival run (dubbed by Variety “the breakout hit of Karlovy Vary”) opened in Los Angeles in the fall of 2002, and is now available on DVD. Cameron Crowe calls it “A completely captivating film filled with characters you won’t want to leave behind.”

Currently Anderson has several projects in various stages of development, including a documentary based on her book and a narrative fiction screenplay co-written with her brother Gene Carlisle.