Cinematographer

Acord began his career with photographer/filmmaker Bruce Weber, which whom he made documentaries, commercials and music videos. His breakthrough came after he shot the music video for Björk's "Big Time Sensuality", directed by Stéphane Sednaoui. Acord continued to work extensively in commercials and music videos through the 1990s. He earned the MTV Video Music Award for Best Cinematography for his work on the Fatboy Slim music video for "Weapon of Choice", which featured Christopher Walken and was directed by Spike Jonze. He also worked with R.E.M. on a regular basis.

Acord made his first foray into narrative feature filmmaking as the cinematographer of Vincent Gallo's Buffalo '66 (1998). He shot Spike Jonze's films Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002), and Where the Wild Things Are (2009), Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation (2003), Marie Antoinette (2006), and her short film Lick the Star (1998), as well as Peter Care's The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (2002).

Commercial director

In the late 1990s, Acord began to transition to commercial directing and in 1998, together with his business partner Jackie Kelman Bisbee, he founded the commercial production company Park Pictures. He received 35 Cannes Lions for his work with clients such as Nike, Apple, HP, Volkswagen, P&G, Subaru. He was nominated for Best Commercial Director by the DGA in 2003, 2011, 2012, and 2017. In 2011, his Super Bowl spot for Volkswagen, "The Force", was named the best ad of 2011 by AdWeek, Creativity, and YouTube and consistently ranks on lists of the greatest Super Bowl commercials of all time. His Apple film "Misunderstood" won the 2014 Emmy Award for Outstanding Commercial. In 2019, he won his second Emmy award for the Nike commercial "Dream Crazy," starring Colin Kaepernick.

In 2019, directed the short film commercial for Xfinity, A Holiday Reunion, based on the film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and starring Henry Thomas, who reprises his role as Elliott.

Director of photography

Short film

Feature film

Documentary film

Music videos

Producer

• Robot & Frank (2012)
• God's Pocket (2014)

Executive producer

• The New Tenants (2009) (Short film)
• Cop Car (2015)
• Other People (2016)
• The Rehearsal (2016)
• The Hero (2017)
• An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn (2018)
• The Sentence (2018)
• Hearts Beat Loud (2018)
• Lazy Susan (2019) (Short film)
• Farewell Amor (2020)
• The Last Shift (2020)
• The Truffle Hunters (2020) (Documentary)
• The Heart Still Hums (2020) (Documentary short)
• Born to Play (2020) (Documentary)
• Another Hayride (2021) (Documentary short)
• Long Weekend (2021)
• There There (2022)
• Aisha (2022)
• Broadway Rising (2022) (Documentary)
• The Independent (2022)
• Earth Mama (2023)
• Late Bloomers (2023)
• Flipside (2023)