Katinka Blackford Newman is an award- winning documentary and drama/documentary  film director/writer with countless hours of high-end broadcast TV to her name. She has made films for major international broadcasters and streamers including Discovery, National Geographic, HBO Max, BBC TV, ITV, and Channel 4.  She trained at BBC TV and spe... Read More

Katinka Blackford Newman is an award- winning documentary and drama/documentary  film director/writer with countless hours of high-end broadcast TV to her name. She has made films for major international broadcasters and streamers including Discovery, National Geographic, HBO Max, BBC TV, ITV, and Channel 4.  She trained at BBC TV and specialises in creative character driven stories from all over the world – from one of Channel 4 /Discovery’s highest ever rated documentaries on morbid obesity to a mother’s painful journey to bring her daughter in law long to justice for murdering her son, to a film about a woman’s pathological need to lie that she is dying of cancer. She has recently directed  a feature length documentary for HBO Max, a world exclusive tracing the rise and fall of a well-known pornographer . In production over lockdown, the film features stories from women whose lives have been upturned and are sharing their stories for the first time. Katinka is an experienced drama/documentary director and has written and directed seven films for the Grierson nominated series Locked Up Abroad for National Geographic. (including the first series). One of her films was nominated for an Emmy (Locked UP Peru). Other drama/documentary credits in which she has written, directed and edited whole episodes include I Shouldn’t Be Alive, Fatal Attraction, The Lake Erie Murders and Autopsy: The Last Hours Of…. She has directed drama crews of over 100 in extreme locations such as Peruvian prisons, jungles in the Philippines and the Atlantic ocean. Her directing experience includes complex shoots - night time underwater shipwreck scenes, fatal animal attacks with real bears , army shoot outs in the Malaysian jungle and murder re-enactments. As a writer/director she is an accomplished storyteller and has turned true stories into drama scripts within tight time frames of a few weeks. With a love of working with people, Katinka is able to inspire loyalty and bring out excellence in those she works with, from actors, to interviewees, to a team of producers, editors and researchers. Read Less