Niamh Donohoe is an award-winning director with over 15 years industry experience in the UK and Australia, with a broad range of screened content spanning broadcast TV documentaries and current affairs, TVCs, character-driven narratives and online content.
Armed with a BA in Gender and Cultural Studies from a UK Top 8 university, and a Masters with Distinction in Screen Studies, Niamh is passionate about content that interrogates challenging ethical, social and political issues, particularly those affecting women: she has worked on longform primetime TV documentaries exploring: underage female sex work in Amy: My Body For Bucks, (BBC 2008); damaging global female beauty standards in Miss Real World (BBC 2008) and delved into the pressures on young Indian-Australian women to marry before 30 in Indian Wedding Race (SBS 2016). Her news and current affairs output includes work on women’s hockey, soccer and volleyball as part of the London Olympics (2012) and she has investigated discrepancies in UK women’s life expectancy across the UK as part of the BBC’s biggest-ever daytime commission, The One Show (BBC 2008).
Soon after emigrating in 2013, Niamh’s professional introduction to Australian screen production was via The Great Australian Fly, an ABC documentary and finalist in the Department of Industry and Science’s Eureka Prize for Science journalism where she directed and shot a series of Behind The Scenes shorts. In 2019, Niamh co-directed a film for Baker’s Delight and Breast Cancer Network Australia that won the Australian Retailers Award for Excellence in Retail Marketing.
Niamh’s ongoing interest in international real-life human stories gave her an opportunity in 2017 to camp on the Great Wall of China to shoot, direct and produce a documentary on a blind ultra-marathoner. Her work sparks imagination and audience engagement evidenced by increasing YouTube views of a short documentary she shot about the Australian regenerative agriculture movement in 2018.
Currently building her drama portfolio and experience, Niamh has just finished a government-funded slate of six narrative films for a mental health organisation where she was engaged as a director and co-writer as part of a world-first project with a budget exceeding AUD$1.5 million. Niamh is now seeking director attachments on TV drama sets, and also interested in collaborating with like-minded writers to direct their scripts.
