Two-time Oscar Nominated Writer/Director Bryan Buckley has been dubbed the “King of the Super Bowl” by the New York Times, having directed 71 commercials for the big game since 2000. Many pieces of Buckley’s work have been inducted into the Museum Of Modern Art’s permanent collection and he is an esteemed recipient of the DGA award, multiple Emmy awards, and over 60 Cannes Lions – including two Grand Prix wins in 2019 and he is rated the most award winning commercial director in the world 2022 from the prestigious One Show and D&AD. A 2010 Adweek Readers Poll named Buckley the Commercial Director of the decade and he was also chosen as one of the 50 best Creative Minds in the last 25 years by Creativity Magazine. Bryan has won three black Pencils from D&AD in the last two years for his work on Mastercard and Change the Ref (there’s only been 69 black pencils awarded in the entirety of the show since 1963*)

After graduating at the top of his class from Syracuse University, Buckley plunged into the Ad business. By the age of 24 he started the company Buckley/DeCerchio with Tom DeCerchio. The brash young agency found their way to the front page of The New York Times Business section, being named one of “Advertising’s Antic Upstarts.”  Their irreverent  brand of humor for clients built the company into a $24 million dollar agency within two years and garnered every major advertising award from Cannes Lions to Clios. 

Buckley’s directing career started in 1994, when he directed the Emmy Award-winning “This is SportsCenter” Campaign. In 1997, Buckley co-founded Hungry Man Productions along with “This is SportsCenter” creator, Hank Perlman. By 2004, the company won the Cannes Festival’s Palme D’or as the top commercial production company in the world and has finished in the top ten for more than ten consecutive years, the first production company to do so. Hungry Man has offices in New York, Los Angeles, London, Rio and Sao Paulo, and boasts an impressive roster of directors including Taika Waititi, Wayne McClammy, and Nanette Burstein. 

In 2013, Buckley wrote and directed the short film ASAD. The film was shot in Africa with an all Somali refugee cast, and screened at over 50 film festivals worldwide, taking top honors at the TriBeCa Film Festival and Michael Moore’s Traverse City Film Festival, among others. The film was nominated for Best Live Action Short Film at the 85th Academy Awards. Archbishop Desmond Tutu said of the film: “They deserve two Oscars: One for creative endeavor, and the other for contributing to the collective understanding of our dependence on one another.” Bryan returned to Africa for his second feature film, Pirates of Somalia, starring Oscar-winner Al Pacino, Evan Peters, Melanie Griffith, and Barkhad Abdi.