About

Irina Vodar is an award-winning filmmaker and graphic designer with over 20 years' experience in film and Broadcast Design with ABC News. Her distinctions range from the 30th Daytime Emmy Award Nomination for Outstanding Achievement in Main Title Design, to the Telly Award, The International Monitor Award, The AD and Design Promo for iTV Award, The George Foster Peabody Award, Edward R. Murrow Awards.

As an Indie Filmmaker, a Women Make Movies and a New York Women in Film collective member, Irina wrote, produced and directed two full length documentary films. Her debut doc feature Miss Gulag, produced in association with Neihausen-Yatskova Films on a beauty pageant in a Russian prison for women, won funding from the Sundance Film Institute Documentary Fund and the Ford Foundation, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2007 (available on Amazon Prime). Miss Gulag received positive reviews from critics and audiences, and won several awards, such as Best Debut Feature at the Moscow International Human Rights Film Festival and the Saratov Film Festival. It was also screened at various international film festivals, such as Berlin, Sheffield, Silverdocs, Seattle, Morelia, Vienna, ZagrebDox, and Warsaw. The film was praised for its humanistic and compassionate portrayal of the women, as well as its insight into contemporary Russian society.

Her second documentary Anything You Lose, an insightful portrayal of infertility journey, won funding from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and test-screened at the Barbican Theater in London, as part of the International Fertility Festival in 2019, to audience acclaim.