TED ROACH

Director / Editor / Sammy Slate 

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Ted Roach is a director, producer and editor who has worked in the film and digital media industries for over twenty years. He has directed, edited and/or produced dozens of documentaries, concert films, music videos, and one MTV reality-doc series. His productions have screened in over 80 film festivals, won many awards, and have been broadcast internationally.

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Recent music film collaborations include documentaries for John Hiatt & Jerry Douglas (“Leftover Feelings: a Studio B Revival”), Kesha (Apple TV’s “Rainbow: The Film”), and Manchester Orchestra (“I Know How to Speak”); feature-length concert films for Staind and Blackberry Smoke; and music videos for all of the above plus Moon Taxi, Tom Morello, Cheap Trick, Trace Adkins, Drake White, Cedric Burnside, and many more. Notably Ted directed and edited Manchester Orchestra's "The Silence" official music video which has collected over 97 million views to date.

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Ted & Sammy Slate are best known for writing, directing, editing, and producing "120 Days: Undocumented in America." This independent documentary won 12 awards in over 30 film festivals and was picked up for worldwide VOD distribution in 2015 (still available on-demand through Amazon Prime and iTunes). In 2016 the program was picked up by "Reel South," a public television documentary  series which will broadcast the film nationally until 2021. Roach raised over $30,000 for the Cortes family through the film's GoFundMe.com campaign, and was a finalist for the 2017 Humanitas Prize in Documentary.

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Previously Ted worked as an editor on Cynthia Hill's "Road to Race Day" & "A Chef's Life," served as a producer/co-editor on the MTV docu-series "Ke$ha: My Crazy Beautiful Life" in 2012-2013, and has produced/edited several other award-winning, broadcast documentaries ("Somay Ku; A Uganda Tennis Story", "Ecoviews; Three Stories from the Chesapeake Bay", and "Saving the American Wild Horse"). As a freelance video journalist and editor in Washington, DC between 2008-2012, he created many digital video shorts for organizations such as the National Park Service, NOAA, the Investigative Reporting Workshop, and the American News Project. 

Prior to his documentary and journalism work, Roach spent six years in Los Angeles working in film/TV production as an assistant director, production coordinator, location scout, and production assistant. He also spent two years as a motion picture talent agent’s assistant at the William Morris Agency in Beverly Hills. He formed his own production company during this time, Sammy Slate Productions, to produce and direct his first film, “The Gentleman Don La Mancha.”

Ted holds an MFA Film degree from American University in Washington DC, where he won the 2011 University Award for Outstanding Graduate Scholarship, and was a national finalist for the 2010 Student Academy Award in Documentary. He earned a directing/editing certification from the Los Angeles Film School in 2002, and a BA History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1996.