ABOUT

His critically acclaimed first feature film, Darfur Now, earned him the International Documentary Association Award for Emerging Filmmaker of the Year (2007). The film was nominated for best documentary of 2007 by the National Board of Review and the Broadcast Film Critics Association. It went on to win the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Documentary. The film was produced by the Academy Award™ winning producer of Crash, Cathy Schulman, Academy Award™ nominee Don Cheadle, and three-time Academy Award™ winning documentarian Mark Jonathan Harris. Warner Bros. distributed Darfur Now worldwide and financed it along with Participant, which spearheaded a global social action campaign. The Winter 2008 issue of Movie Maker Magazine named Braun - along with Errol Morris, Oliver Stone, Michael Moore, and Robert Redford - one of 25 filmmakers whose work has changed the world.

His feature documentary, Betting On Zero, was nominated for a Writer’s Guild of America Award for best documentary screenplay of 2017. The film chronicles the campaign of controversial hedge fund titan Bill Ackman and Latina activist Julie Contreras to expose Herbalife as a massive international pyramid scheme and was the subject of extensive international press coverage - in the NY Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, El Pais, - and was featured on John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight. Betting On Zero premiered in the World Doc Competition at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2016, where it won a special jury mention for investigative work. 

Braun’s latest feature film, ¡Viva Maestro!, debuted theatrically in April 2022 and on HBO Max and HBO Max Latin America in December 2022. It marks his second feature documentary with Participant. An emotional affirmation of the resilience of art in a time of political crisis, ¡Viva Maestro! tells the story of superstar conductor Gustavo Dudamel as social unrest in his Venezuelan homeland tests his conviction that music has the power to unite. The documentary was produced by Braun, Academy Award™ winning producer of Forest Gump Steve Tisch, Dean Schramm, Nicolas Paine and Howard Bragman.

Braun is a Professor in the John Wells Division of Writing for the Screen and Television at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, and the inaugural holder of the Joseph Campbell Endowed Chair in Cinematic Ethics. In their April 2018 Report on the Best Film Schools, Variety Magazine named him one of the world’s Ten Top Teachers in Film and TV.

Nicolas has filmed across the United States and throughout Europe, South America, Southeast Asia, and Australia, with production entities such as Paramount, Fox, Warner Bros, Participant, Nickelodeon, Voice of America, Image G and Luminary Films. Between 2004 and 2010 he served as Executive Producer for Christopher Coppola Enterprises, overseeing all development and production and helping launch the non-profit “Project Accessible Hollywood” festival, which brings digital storytelling tools and techniques to underserved communities in the US and around the world. Nicolas is a graduate, with honors, of the USC School Of Cinema-Television.

Changing course, Schramm became a literary agent with the Artists Agency and the Jim Preminger Agency. In 2007, Schramm opened his own management/production company, The Schramm Group. Schramm’s credits include: Executive Producer “Darfur Now”, nominated for Best Documentary Film of the Year by the National Board of Review, The Broadcast Film Critics Association, The International Press Academy, The Chicago and San Francisco Film Critics Associations and winner of the 2008 NAACP Image Award; Executive Producer, Lifetime’s “Secrets of Eden” based on Chris Bohjalian’s New York Times Bestseller starring John Stamos and Anna Gunn; Producer, “Re-Animator: The Musical”, adapted from the classic horror film “Re-Animator”, winner of six LA Weekly Theatre Awards including Best Musical Of The Year, LA Stage Alliance Ovation and Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards for Best Book and Best Music and Lyrics and invited production to the New York Musical Theater Festival, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and to Las Vegas’ Smith Center for the Performing Arts; Producer “Taste” winner of Stage Raw Los Angeles Theater Awards for Best Playwriting, Best Set Design, Best Direction, and Best Two Person Performance; Producer, “iViva Maestro!”, the first Center of Gravity Production. Schramm and producing partner, Ted Braun, maintain a longstanding collaboration starting when they played music together at Amherst College; Schramm violin, Braun, bassoon.