In the 2000s, Greg Kwedar was a student at Texas A&M planning to enter the business industry. Fast forward nearly two decades and Kwedar is now a film director, producer and writer nominated for three Oscars at the 97th Academy Awards for his film “Sing Sing.” 

“I’ve always had vision and would have goals in terms of where I wanted to be, whether that was athletics, sports or on-campus leadership,” Kwedar said. “I’ve always been an ambitious person and competitive, and yet, that’s kind of a dream that’s too big. I grew up watching the Oscars, and maybe there’s some small part of you being like, ‘Well, what would I say if I was up on stage?’ but I wasn’t allowing myself to think in those terms. It was more like, ‘Can I make a film? And if I can make a first film, can I make a second film?’”

And he did make a film — two in fact. His directorial feature debut, “Transpecos,” premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival, and his next feature, “Sing Sing,” was named one of the best films of 2024 by the National Board of Review and the American Film Institute. 

But before the accolades and success, Kwedar attended A&M. Recruited to play rugby, he was always entrepreneurial and was enrolled in the Professional Program in Accounting. 

“I had a DJ business and a window-cleaning business in high school, and the Mays Business School felt like a natural extension of some of the things that I was interested in,” Kwedar said. “I just wanted to be in the best program at one of the best schools on campus.” 

However, while interviewing for internships in New York, he contemplated whether there were other things he was meant to do.

“I decided to walk uptown from the financial district, and I was wearing this very ill-fitting suit,” Kwedar said. “I just remember walking through Washington Square Park in New York City and seeing all the energy. There were artists there, there were hippies, there were all sorts of personalities kind of clashing together. And I was like, ‘I love this city. I want to be in New York, but I don’t want to be in New York wearing this suit.’”

He began to write and pursue that spark of passion the next summer during a trip to Sydney, Australia to play on a rugby team.  He toured a film school in the city and worked as a production assistant for a short film on tour. There, he fell in love with the process of making films.      

“I showed up on this film set, and the second I stepped onto the set, I knew it was my home, my people,” Kwedar said. “It was like this amazing artistic collaboration across all of these disciplines working to tell one story, and I felt alive in a way I hadn’t before. I came back to my senior year of accounting, and halfway through my first exam, I dropped out in the middle of the test to become a filmmaker.”

When Kwedar left the accounting program, he stayed an extra year to get a marketing degree while he was applying to film schools. Through the Fellows program at A&M, he started working for an organization that allowed him to be in the U.S.-Mexico border, and he began to find stories that he really wanted to tell. 

“I would make videos about our time down there, and there would be things in it that would start to click like, ‘Oh, this is how I can use stories. I can use storytelling as a platform to hopefully bring us all closer together, to see each other and to find connection,’” Kwedar said.

After starting to film these stories along the border and in Central America, he received a voicemail that he had been accepted into New York University Tisch School Of The Arts, a film school where famous directors such as Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee have studied. 

“I was coming alive as an artist in really profound ways, and I was getting ready to go back into an academic environment,” Kwedar said. “It felt off to me, but yet it was also such a prestigious, special opportunity. So, I called the head of the school and said, ‘I just have one question: Am I screwing my life up by not going to NYU?’ After a long pause, the head of the school replied, ‘Honestly, you could be pushing a hot dog cart in Santa Monica and get just as close to being the filmmaker you’re meant to be.’” 

Proceeding that phone call, Kwedar turned down a scholarship to NYU and moved to Austin, Texas to pursue filmmaking full-time. He collaborated with other aspiring filmmakers, some of whom went to A&M, and was introduced to his creative partner and frequent collaborator, Clint Bentley.  

The circle produced short films together, which developed into producing longer-form films and documentaries. But as Kwedar tried to break into directing his own film, it just never seemed to come about. It wasn’t until an unfortunate accident while he was producing a film in Thailand that his life was put into perspective. 

“We were in our van driving to our hotel and as we were turning, a truck T-boned us and we got in this terrible car accident in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night in southern Thailand,” Kwedar said. “We all should have died in that car accident. I just remember sitting amongst all the wreckage being like, ‘I got another chance at this, and I’m not gonna rest until I actually really go for my dream.’”

After that trip, he went all in to make “Transpecos,” which allowed him to make his next film, which was released eight years later, “Sing Sing.” 

“Sing Sing” revolves around a real non-profit program in prisons called “Rehabilitation Through the Arts,” where inmates are given the opportunity to perform in arts such as theater, dance and creative writing, among others. The narrative film features real alumni of the program, some of whom served time at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, where the film was made, hence the title. Kwedar could’ve never imagined the reception this film received from audiences. 

“We were always talking about when we were making ‘Sing Sing’ that we never wanted the experience to be transactional, but an exchange,” Kwedar said. “It was an exchange between artists through love and respect and connection, and that is transferring now to places where we screen it and what happens in these audiences.”

Now available in over 1000 prisons for free to over a million incarcerated people to watch, Kwedar hopes audiences relate to the film the same way incarcerated individuals have at showings in Sing Sing Correctional Facility and San Quentin Rehabilitation Center.  

“There are things that happened in that room that I don’t think could happen anywhere else unless you were going through incarceration,” Kwedar said. “I just hope that us on the outside of the walls find that empathy and yearn for men inside to be able to feel that wind on their face again, and that when we do feel it again that we don’t take it for granted, that we know how precious a gift it is to be able to move freely out in this world.”

Through his success in the film industry, he hopes for Aggies to view his story and to realize the hidden potential that may lie within themselves. 

“I just hope that this may reach someone on campus who has an artist inside them that maybe they’re afraid to listen to,” Kwedar said. “It took me a while for that voice to get loud enough to finally act on it. But we need artists in this world just as much as we need the engineers that build our bridges, roads and buildings, as much as we need the veterinarians and the doctors and all the amazing disciplines on campus that are helping change the world. We need artists, too. So to the artists, because I know there’s not many on campus, we need you too.”