Catherine Bisley is a Wellington based writer and director. She grew up in rural communities all over the North Island and is of Ngāpuhi (Te Kapotai, Ngati Hau), Danish, and Scottish descent. At age 12, her ambition in life was to be a goat farmer; now, aged 26, one of the films she is developing is about a rhinoceros.
In 2008, Catherine graduated with a Master’s degree in Creative Writing and an Honours degree in Film and English literature from Victoria University. Since then, she has written, directed, and co-produced two self-funded short films, the fish will swim and Alwyn Motel. Alwyn Motel recently premiered at the New Zealand Film Festival. Her radio play Curtains was produced by Radio New Zealand as a winner of their Student Shorts competition (2008) and her feature film script December was awarded funding as the winner of the New Zealand Film Commission’s First Writers Initiative that same year. She was an Escalator finalist in 2011 and travelled to Killer Films, New York, on a Script to Screen scholarship in 2012. In September, she will be shooting her next short film Wide Eyed, which is being funded through Premiere Shorts and produced by Catherine Fitzgerald. She also has two feature films in development.
Catherine has also written about film for award winning websites The Lumiere Reader and New Zealand on Screen and is a freelance script editor and photographer. Outside of film, she works part-time as a photograph and manuscript librarian at the Alexander Turnbull Library.
