2026 BEA OL

Marty Lang is an Assistant Professor of Communication, Media & Theatre at Mississippi State University. He attended the University of Connecticut, graduating with a B.A. in Journalism and covering entertainment for the New York Times. He holds M.F.A. degrees in Film Production from Florida State University, and in Screenwriting from California State University, Northridge.

Lang has written and directed two feature films, the drama "Stay With Me," released worldwide in 2025 by Allen Media, and the romantic dramedy "Rising Star," which was acquired for worldwide distribution by Content Film in 2013, and is streaming on Amazon.

His producing credits include the horror comedy "Chompy & the Girls," featuring Udo Kier, distributed by Freestyle Digital Media, the 2020 Sundance world premiere "The Ride," a comedy Web series directed and starring Linas Phillips, and the satire "Being Michael Madsen," starring Michael Madsen, Virginia Madsen, David Carradine and Lacey Chabert. He associate produced "Out of My Hand," a 2016 Independent Spirit Award nominee distributed by Ava DuVernay's ARRAY. He was also creator, showrunner, director and actor in the drama Web series "The Daily," which world premiered at SeriesFest in 2020, and won the Jury Prize for Best Arkansas Short at the 2022 Arkansas Shorts Film Festival.

He is the author of "The Self-Sustaining Filmmaker: Creating Crowdsourced, Crowdfunded and Community-Supported Independent Film," published by Focal Press/Routledge. It contains a foreword from Mark Duplass, and was the #1 Film/Television book on Amazon the first week of its release.

Lang is the former Director of the MFA in Film, Television and Digital Media at the University of Georgia, ranked #43 in TheWrap's 2024 Top 50 Film Schools in the United States. He has taught film at the University of Memphis, University of Central Arkansas and Quinnipiac University, and worked as the Undergraduate Production Manager at the Dodge College of Film and Media Arts at Chapman University. He also created the curriculum for the nationally-recognized Connecticut Film Industry Training Program, a state-sponsored film workforce initiative that ran from 2008 to 2012.