Keith Maitland is an Austin-based filmmaker working across fiction and non-fiction. He is drawn to stories of people and communities at moments of disruption, exploring how crisis reshapes identity and reveals the complicated, resilient, and often surprising ways we remain connected to one another.

In 2016, Maitland’s animated school-shooting doc, TOWER, won three awards at SXSW, an Emmy, and the Critics Choice Award for Most Innovative Documentary; 2021’s DEAR MR. BRODY, which explored questions of want, desire, and need in American culture, sold to Greenwich Entertainment out of the Telluride Film Festival and premiered on HBOMax.

With documentary projects in development that focus on a solution to wildfires, a never-before-seen look at 9/11, an all-archival exploration of the life of Ingmar Bergman, and an unsolved murder in a wax museum—and scripted projects set against a mistaken Hawaiian missile crisis, pitting CIA vs FBI, and infiltrating the world of birders (to solve a murder), Maitland is a natural-born storyteller who follows his curiosity and thrives on variety.

Drawing on an early career in scripted production, Maitland approaches each project as an opportunity to experiment with form, blending performance, archival material, animation, recreation, and vérité. At the heart of his work is a simple guiding principle: create to connect—using cinema to find the strange, complicated, and deeply human places where our individual experiences become shared ones.

He is also co-host of the podcast DOCWALKS.