Anderson West

Anderson is an award-winning British-American writer/director who has worked for over a decade crafting short films, commercials, and documentaries for brands, charities, and museums across the UK. He is also a part-time lecturer in Film Production at the University of Staffordshire. 

Anderson was born in sunny South Florida and moved to Stoke on Trent as a teenager in the early 2000s. He’s an adopted Stokie, and this cultural blend influences his storytelling, often exploring themes of identity and belonging. With a multi-genre approach, Anderson's 2016 short film "Diembe" (an award-nominated and internationally screened piece) explored the journey of a young Kenyan boy migrating to the UK. His more recent shorts, "Family Ties" (2022) and the Black River Film Festival award-winning "The Book of Love" (2023). "Family Ties" delves into a father-son hiking accident, while "The Book of Love" is a romantic comedy about a man's feigned love for books to impress a librarian, only to find himself genuinely captivated by literature. Anderson's latest film, "7x7x7" (a Pitch Film Fund Finalist in 2023), follows three strangers on a late-night bus, unknowingly connected by a tragic hit-and-run. The film premieres in October 2024. Beyond directing, Anderson co-wrote and developed "Dante's Inferno" (directed by Sofian Francis), a short film scheduled for release in late 2024. This film serves as a proof of concept for a television series. He is a three-time finalist of the Pitch Film Fund and is developing a feature-length film, "The Motherland," based on the 1919 Liverpool race riots (his 2020 Pitch UK Runner-up project). Anderson is actively involved in the film community, being a member of the Staffordshire Arts Collective Kwanzaa Collective UK and co-founding the Staffordshire Film Collective.