Allison Otto is an Emmy-winning filmmaker and journalist.
Her first feature film The Thief Collector, premiered in the Documentary Feature Competition at the 2022 South by Southwest Film Festival. The doc/narrative hybrid was nominated for a 2023 Critics Choice Award for Best First Feature Documentary and Best True Crime Documentary. Variety magazine hailed The Thief Collector as “a nimble and entertaining dissection of a crime” and a film “that builds to a supreme moment of ‘Oh. My. God.’” Additional festival screenings included the Palm Springs International Film Festival, Hot Docs, the SFFILM festival, Hot Springs, the Woods Hole Film Festival, and Telluride Mountainfilm. The Thief Collector is currently streaming on Peacock and Amazon.
Allison’s documentary short, The Love Bugs (2019), was awarded Outstanding Short Documentary in the 42nd Annual News & Documentary Emmy Awards after screening on POV Shorts Season 3 (2020). The film was also shortlisted for a 2019 International Documentary Association Award and was longlisted for an Oscar in the Documentary Short category. Allison is also a 2019 recipient of the SFFILM Catapult Film Fellowship, a 2018 and 2011 Telluride Mountainfilm Commitment grant recipient, and a 2018 Roy W. Dean grant winner.
Her journalism clients have included National Geographic, BBC America, NBC, the Sierra Club, Travel Channel, Atlas Obscura, and Lonely Planet. Allison’s exclusive story of the discovery of a new invertebrate species was selected by National Geographic as one of their “Ten Best First-of-their-Kind” stories of 2016.
Her first film, Keeper of the Mountains, received 12 film festival awards and screened globally.
Allison graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in Communications and a master’s degree in Sociology.