Amber Kandarian



Amber Rose Kandarian (born 1982 ) is an American filmmaker with Armenian roots and founder of Impact International Pictures. Kandarian is a graduate of the University of California, Irvine and was selected to be a video/multimedia artist scholar at Seven Degrees in Laguna Beach. Kandarian was also one of the first ArtsBridge Scholars in the Picturing Peace project. The Picturing Peace program was an ArtsBridge collaboration in which college visual arts majors in one semester programs helped middle school students learn to use digital cameras in order to communicate their feelings and ideas about peace. Shortly after she produced and directed the feature documentary RESPECT THE DOC a feature length documentary about documentary filmmakers and how they can shift the culture. This film had a theatrical release in California and Sydney, Australia. Kandarian also instructed courses on documentary filmmaking at the Sydney Film School.

In 2005 Kandarian traveled to New Zealand to edit TVNZ's THE ROOKIE on Studio Two with Taylormade Media. During this time she won the award for best cinematography at the New Zealand 48-Hour Short Film Festival for her mockumentary BRUISED GOLD, about the dangers of a fictional drug derived from bananas, later to be shown on the C4 television network.

In 2006 Kandarian was invited to her motherland of Armenia to assist in the BBC production of ‘A Story of War and Peace’. During this trip she exhibited a series of contemporary art video pieces at the Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art (ACCEA/NPAK). She also became Armenia's first professional female dj. She received her own radio program on HYE FM in Yerevan, Armenia. A year later she toured Georgia, Turkey, Bulgaria and Spain as Armenia's first female dj, formerly known as DJ Ambrosian and DJ AmberK.

While working in documentary Kandarian began delivering luxury yachts to raise capital for her personal production company Impact International Pictures. Impact International Pictures was founded in 2003 and later divided into three Docu Divisions, DocuThesis, DOCUinc and DocuCaseStudy.

In 2010 after 7 years in the commercial world of documentary Kandarian added three Docu Divisions under Impact International Pictures. The first was DocuThesis  a hybrid between documentary and graduate research to be used to allow university students and professors to share their research visually with a larger audience. Kandarian founded this company to give a voice to graduate researchers. The second was DocuCaseStudy a hybrid of documentary and the business case study similar to the Harvard Business Review's written case studies. The third division was called DOCUinc assisting companies to create a voice for their businesses with documentary.