Ford graduated from Hamilton College in 1994, and beginning in 2002 he worked as a series Producer at PBS for ten years.
In 2011 he was named one of Filmmaker magazine's 25 New Faces of Independent Film. He also received the 2011–2012 Fledgling Fund Fellowship at MacDowell.
In 2017 he was #97 on The Root 100, an "annual list of the most influential African Americans, ages 25 to 45."
In 2018, he and Joslyn Barnes were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for producing Strong Island, which he also directed. As such, he was the first openly transgender man to be nominated for any Academy Award, and the first openly transgender Director to be nominated for any Academy Award. Strong Island is about the murder of his brother william Ford, which occurred in 1992.
