Andrew Okpeaha MacLean is an Iņupiaq filmmaker born and raised in Alaska. In 2008 he was named one of 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine. His most recent film, Sikumi (On the Ice) premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival where it won the Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking and went on to many other awards at festivals around the world. Other films include Natchiliagniaqtuguk Aapagalu (Seal Hunting With Dad), which had its premiere at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, Kinnaq Nigaqtuqtuaq (The Snaring Madman), which won best short film at the 2006 American Indian Film Festival, Such A Perfect Day, and When The Season Is Good: Artists Of Arctic Alaska, a full length documentary which was a featured screening in the 2007 Arctic Summer Series at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian and was acquired for broadcast by ARTE, European Public Television.
In his hometown of Barrow, Alaska, he co-founded the Iņupiat Theater, the first theater company in the country dedicated to performing entirely in the indigenous Iņupiaq language. He also served for three years as the Artistic Director of Stickfigure Productions, a theater company based in Seattle.
He has traveled in North and South America, Europe and New Zealand, worked in Siberia as a biological research assistant and is a member of the Egasak whaling crew in Barrow. He is a recipient of a 2008 United States Artists Rasmuson Fellowship, the John H. Johnson Film Award, a 2004 Princess Grace Foundation Graduate Film Fellowship, the 2003-2004 Martin E. Segal prize, the 2007-2008 Clive Davis Award for Excellence in Music In Film, and the 2007-2008 Riese Award. He holds his MFA in film directing from New York University.