Su Rynard (born 1961) is a Canadian film and television director, editor and video artist. [1] She is most noted as the director of the 2005 feature film Kardia , [2] which was the winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Feature Film Prize at the 2005 Hamptons International Film Festival. [3]
The niece of Canadian experimental filmmakers Michael Snow and Joyce Wieland, [4] she began her career as a video artist in the 1980s, [5] associated with Trinity Square Video [6] and the YYZ Gallery art collective. [7]
In the 1990s, she had editing credits on Cynthia Roberts's films The Last Supper and Bubbles Galore , [8] and directed the short films Signal (1993), Big Deal, So What (1995), [9] Eight Men Called Eugene (1996), [10] and Strands (1997), [11] before graduating from the Canadian Film Centre in 1997. [12] Her short films, united by themes of the relationship between science and life, were also later screened together as the anthology package Life Tests. [13]
She released her full-length debut documentary Dream Machine, a profile of musician Roberta Michele, in 2000. [14] She subsequently worked on various documentary television series before releasing Kardia in 2005. [2] From 2008 to 2015, she directed numerous episodes of the documentary series Air Crash Investigation .
In 2015, she released the documentary film The Messenger , profiling the environmental threats to songbirds. [15] In 2021, she released Duet for Solo Piano, a profile of pianist Eve Egoyan. [16]
Her television documentary Reef Rescue, about efforts to save coral reefs from environmental destruction, was broadcast in 2020 as an episode of The Nature of Things , [17] and in 2021 as an episode of Nova .