Spinning Nancy is a documentary production company founded in 2019 by director Penny Lane and producer Gabriel Sedgwick. Their mission is to make films as entertaining as they are thought-provoking.
Past productions include the critically acclaimed documentaries Hail Satan?, which premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and is distributed by Magnolia Pictures, Listening to Kenny G, an HBO Original Documentary which premiered at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival, and Confessions of a Good Samaritan, which premiered at the 2023 SXSW Festival.
They are also executive producers of Time Bomb Y2K, an HBO Original Documentary directed by Brian Becker and Marley McDonald.
Spinning Nancy’s upcoming slate includes films about an escaped Eurasian eagle-owl in New York City, the Mrs. America pageant, and several other yet-to-be-announced projects.
PENNY LANE - DIRECTOR, CO-FOUNDER
Penny has been making award-winning, innovative nonfiction films for over a decade. This includes six features and over a dozen short films. A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Lane has also received grants and awards from the Sundance Film Festival, Cinereach, Creative Capital, Chicken & Egg Pictures, Tribeca Film Institute, Wexner Center for the Arts and many others. Penny has been honored with mid-career retrospectives at the Museum of the Moving Image, San Francisco DocFest, Open City Documentary Festival and Cinema Moderne. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. And yes, Penny Lane is her real name.
GABRIEL SEDGWICK - PRODUCER, CO-FOUNDER
Gabriel Sedgwick hails from the grim and frostbitten kingdom of Sweden but lives in New York City, where he has produced both fiction and documentary films that have screened at festivals including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, SXSW, Rotterdam, Full Frame, and New Directors/New Films. He's a Sundance Creative Producing Labs fellow, Berlinale Talent fellow, two-time Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program Grantee, and enthusiastic karaoke participant.
NICKOLAS HASSE - HEAD OF PRODUCTION
Since joining the production of the award-winning Hail Satan?, Nick has worked across all of Spinning Nancy's documentaries. He is the co-producer of Listening to Kenny G (2021) and Confessions of a Good Samaritan (2023). He can be found coordinating on set, overseeing post-production at the office, or mountain biking in the woods.
JULIA LEWIS - STAFF PRODUCER
After an auspicious start in the world of archival filmmaking, assisting on series like “Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes” and the Oscar-winning film “Summer of Soul”, Julia has been an associate producer, story-producer, and co-producer, working with directors like Ross Kaufman, Jon Kasbe and Joe Berlinger. She's worked on documentary series and films you might have seen on Netflix, Hulu, Showtime and beyond.