Danny Schmidt

Danny Schmidt is an award-winning director, producer and cinematographer of non-fiction television, documentaries and web content. He has produced, directed and photographed documentary films for clients including PBS, National Geographic, Netflix, Disney+, EarthX, NASA and many others. Schmidt won an NW Emmy award for cinematography for his director of photography work on the PBS film Indian Relay and another for best topical documentary for Finding Traction on Netflix. He received his master’s degree in science and natural history filmmaking in 2012 from Montana State University and his bachelor’s in earth science from the University of Utah. His topics often focus on the environment, as seen in his work for National Geographic’s “Expedition Wild” and the PBS series “Earth: A New Wild,” as well as independent documentary films, such as Dear Governor Hickenlooper (Mountainfilm 2014), Message in a Bottle and Running Wild (both Mountainfilm 2016). Together with Eric Bendick, he is the co-director of The Last Green Thread (Mountainfilm 2019) and directed the films Janwaar (Mountainfilm 2022), which won a 2019 Mountainfilm Commitment Grant, 4DWN (Mountainfilm 2023), Roots (Mountainfilm 2025) and The Book of George (Mountainfilm 2025). Schmidt is a Sony Cline Ambassador and lives in Salt Lake City.