Nevada City, CA…David Vassar, Academy Award®-nominated and Emmy® Award-winning writer, director and documentarian, was awarded the 2017 John de Graaf Award for Environmental Filmmaking at the 15th Annual Wild and Scenic Film Festival awards ceremony on Sunday, January 15, 2017. The John de Graff Award was established as a way to honor living activist filmmakers and recognizes their significant body of work about environmental issues.

David Vassar has been called a visionary documentarian whose films have consistently identified environmental and sustainability issues years before the mainstream media. He continues to lead the conversation on pressing environmental issues of our time.

John de Graaf, in whose honor the John de Graaf Environmental Filmmaking Award is named, is a documentary filmmaker who has produced more than a dozen prime-time national PBS specials and has won more than 100 filmmaking awards. The Award is
presented each year at the Wild and Scenic Film Festival in California, which has become one of the most important green film festivals in the world.

During his more than 40-years of filmmaking experience, David Vassar was honored for his lifetime achievements that stretch back to his 1970 student film entitled “Yosemite,” made when he was only 19-years old and while still in college, which documented the Fourth of July riots between young park visitors and park rangers. It was the beginning of a journey that continues to this day; one that would take him to some of the nation’s most magnificent National Parks where he has written, directed, and produced more than a dozen films. Over the decades, Vassar has won an Emmy and was nominated for an Oscar at the age of 28 for his 1980 documentary, Generation on the Wind, about a group of backyard mechanics, artists and environmentalists who were building a windmill to generate electricity on a remote island off the coast of Massachusetts. Vassar’s film, Exquisite Wasteland, currently in production, explores the beauty and fragility of the desert southwest and the biodiversity of this unique, but at risk, pristine landscape.

For almost a year, David Vassar has been touring a live multi-media presentation of his life’s work entitled, A Walk in the Park with David Vassar, to sold-out audiences and resounding accolades. The program premiered at the 2016 Environmental Film Festival and was presented at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, in Washington, DC.

Vassar will present A Walk in the Park at the Officers Club in the Presidio of San Francisco, as part of the Presidio Dialogues on Thursday, February 9, 2016, at 6 pm. Admission is FREE. Order tickets here: http://bit.ly/vassarpresidio.