Parker Posey Selected for Sundance Awards Jury; David Hyde Pierce to Host Ceremony 1/30

The 2010 Sundance Film Festival announced today the members of five juries awarding prizes at the Festival, which runs January 21-31, 2010 in Park City, Salt Lake City, Ogden and Sundance, Utah. The juries collectively are comprised of individuals from the global arts community, each of whom brings unique perspective and range of experience.

All awards will be announced the evening of January 30 at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival Awards Ceremony, to be hosted by David Hyde Pierce at the Park City Racquet Club. The Short Film Awards will also be named earlier at a ceremony on Tuesday, January 26 at Park City's Jupiter Bowl. New for 2010, the Best of NEXT award, selected by ballots cast by the eight NEXT filmmakers, will celebrate a film creating the greatest art on a low budget. The Best of NEXT award is presented by YouTubeTM.

The Lucille Lortel Award-winning Parker Posey has been confirmed as one of this year's jurors for the Sundance Film Festival.  Posey will serve as a juror for the U.S. dramatic competition, alongside author Russell Banks, producer Jason Kliot, cinematographer Robert Yeoman, and director Karyn Kusama.

Posey starred in the Off-Broadway revival of Hurlyburly (Lortel Award) and Fifth of July (Lortel nominated). Her stage credits include Broadway's Taller Than a Dwarf, Geffen Playhouse's Four Dogs and a Bone, TV's "As the World Turns," "Tales of the City," "Hell on Heels: the Battle of Mary Kay" (Golden Globe nomination) and the films "The Daytrippers," "The House of Yes," "Clockwatchers," "Waiting for Guffman," "Best in Show" and "A Mighty Wind." She has been deemed "Queen of the Indies" for her extensive independent film resume.

The 2010 Sundance film Festival Juries are:

U.S. Documentary Competition

Greg Barker
Greg Barker is an award-winning filmmaker who has worked in more than 50 countries across six continents. His most recent film, Sergio won the Documentary Editing Award at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, is short-listed for the 2010 Academy Awards, and screens on HBO this spring.

Dayna Goldfine
For more than 20 years, Emmy Award-winning director/producer Dayna Goldfine has, together with her partner, Dan Geller, created critically acclaimed multi-character documentary narratives that weave individual personal stories into a larger portrait of the human experience. The National Society of Film Critics and the National Board of Review recognized their film, Ballets Russes, which screened at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, as one of the top five documentaries that year.

Nancy Miller
Nancy Miller joined Wired as a senior editor in 2006 and currently oversees much of the magazine's entertainment coverage. Prior to Wired, she was a staff writer at Entertainment Weekly and a freelance producer and on-air correspondent for KCRW in Los Angeles.

Morgan Spurlock
Morgan Spurlock's first film, Super Size Me, premiered at the 2004 Festival, won the Directing Award and went on to receive the Writers Guild of America documentary screenplay award and earn an Academy Award nomination. Spurlock has directed, produced, and distributed multiple film and TV projects, including the critically acclaimed FX television series 30 Days and the films Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden? (Sundance Film Festival 2008), Confessions of a Superhero, Czech Dream, Chalk, The Future of Food, What Would Jesus Bu?, and the soon-to-be-released Freakonomics.

Ondi Timoner
Ondi Timoner is the only filmmaker to win the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival twice, first for DIG! in 2004 and again last year for We Live in Public. Both films are now part of the Permanent Collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Timoner has also directed the award-winning sociopolitical feature films The Nature of the Beast (1994) and Join Us (2007) and a short film, Recycle, which premiered at Sundance in 2005, continuing on to the Cannes Film Festival and schools worldwide.

U.S. Dramatic Competition

Russell Banks
Russell Banks is the author of five short-story collections and eleven novels, including Cloudsplitter, Rule of the Bone, and The Reserve. His work has received numerous awards and been widely translated and anthologized. Two of his novels, The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction, were adapted into award-winning films. The Darling, Continental Drift, and Rule of the Bone are currently in development. Banks is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Jason Kliot
Jason Kliot is an Academy Award-nominated producer whose credits encompass more than 40 feature films by such acclaimed directors as Jim Jarmusch, Miguel Arteta, Brian De Palma, HAl Hartley, Steven Soderbergh, Nicole Holofcener, and Todd Solondz. Kliot has produced 20 films that have screened at the Sundance Film Festival, including two Grand Jury Prizewinners: Welcome to the Dollhouse in 1996 and Three Seasons in 1999.

Karyn Kusama
Karyn Kusama wrote and directed her first feature film, Girlfight, in 1999. The film won the Directing Award and shared the Grand Jury Prize at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival and was released by Sony Screen Gems. In 2005, she directed the science-fiction love story Aeon Flux for Paramount Pictures. Her third directorial effort, Jennifer's Body, was recently released by Twentieth Century Fox.

Parker Posey
Parker Posey has appeared in more than 50 films, including Happy Tears (upcoming); Broken English, which screened at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and earned her an Independent Spirit Award nomination and an array of Christopher Guest films: For Your Consideration, A Mighty Wind, Best in Show, and Waiting for Guffman. For her performance in The House of Yes, Posey received a Special Jury Prize at Sundance in 1997.

Robert Yeoman
Robert Yeoman won the Independent Spirit Award for cinematography for Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy. He also worked on Roman Coppola's CQ; Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale, which screened at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival; and Drew Barrymore's Whip It. Yeoman served as Wes Anderson's cinematographer on Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic, and The Darjeeling Limited. Studio credits include Peyton Reed's Yes Man and the upcoming Get Him to the Greek.

World Cinema Documentary Competition

Jennifer Baichwal
Jennifer Baichwal has been directing and producing documentaries for 15 years. Her last feature, Manufactured Landscapes, about the work of artist Edward Burtynsky, was released in 12 countries and screened at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. Act of God, a feature documentary about the metaphysical effects of being struck by lightning, opened the Hot Docs Film Festival in May 2009 and is currently in release through Mongrel Media in Canada and Zeitgeist Films in the United States.