A native of Chicago suburbia, Adam Davenport is twenty-six years old and directed Academy Award nominee Melissa Leo and Tony nominee David Harbour in his Yale thesis film, Midnight Son, which he shot on 35mm with Clint Eastwood’s cinematographer Tom Stern. The short became the recipient of the Panavision New Filmmaker Award, a distinction shared by the first films of Steven Soderbergh, Paul Thomas Anderson and Jared Hess. Davenport’s spec script Oreo is in development with Keke Palmer attached to star. He is also mounting a Los Angeles revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night with an all-black cast starring Academy Award nominee and four-time Emmy winner Alfre Woodard, to be produced by Stephanie Allain. His credits as stage director include an Equity production of The Lion in Winter in Connecticut and A Streetcar Named Desire. He recently mounted readings of Long Day’s Journey Into Night with Laurence Fishburne, Terrence Howard and Laz Alonso, Woody Allen’s Interiors with Academy Award nominee Sally Kirkland, and Three Sisters with Alicia Silverstone and Creed Bratton from The Office.

The Dead Circus, which he adapted from John Kaye’s novel that was on the New York Times Book of the Year list in 2002, will be Davenport’s first feature. The cast includes Melissa Leo, Michael Shannon, and Michael C. Hall.