Cody Rea grew up in the Texas Panhandle, where grain elevators stick out on the endless stretches of farmland and the dust from feedyards leaves a stench the locals call “the smell of money.” Cody spent a few years behind the camera as a videographer at different TV News stations in Amarillo. That’s where he grasped the power of storytelling from reporters pounding away on keyboards. The gig allowed him to ramble across the midwest, where he earned his bachelor's in Film Production from Bowling Green State University. Like many other small-town Texas refugees, Cody found his way to Austin. He continued working in TV production before switching gears to brew beer professionally for a number of years until the pandemic shut everything down. In those days of isolation, he wrote his first feature. $pur, a Neo-Western, was featured as a Top 10 Finalist in Final Draft’s 2021 Big Break and Semifinalist in the 2021 Austin Film Festival. He likes to explore the effects of masculinity on minority outsiders through the Neo-Noir and Neo-Western genres, subverted in surrealism.
Areas of Interest: Screenwriting, Directing.