Irene is an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning, Oscar-nominated, director, producer, writer and cinematographer whose documentaries have shown theatrically, at film festivals and on television worldwide. Besides her 2004 Emmy win for her CBS News portrait of the architect Samuel Mockbee, Irene’s team won the 2012 Emmy for Music and Sound for her HBO film, Saving Pelican 895. Her documentary short, The Final Inch, was nominated for a 2009 Academy Award, three Emmy Awards, and won the International Documentary Association’s Pare Lorentz Award for outstanding cinematography. Her first feature-length film, Hear and Now, premiered at Sundance in 2007 where it won the Audience Award, and went on to receive a 2008 Peabody Award and numerous Audience and Jury awards around the world. Hear and Now was also nominated for Documentary of the Year by the Producer’s Guild of America. Irene’s passion for documentary portraiture began as a still photographer, with her landmark photography book, Buddhas in Disguise, about the lives of disabled people across the Himalayas. Based out of Kathmandu, Nepal for five years, she made her first documentary for UNICEF in 1992 and then returned to the US to direct and produce a variety of character-driven documentaries, from renegade polygamists to Bluegrass musicians and heroes battling the American health care system. She worked as a Producer for CBS Sunday Morning, and her television documentaries have appeared on HBO, A&E, The History Channel and Fox. Irene graduated from NYU and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. In addition to filmmaking, she has led more than 10 Himalayan expeditions and lives with her family in Portland, Oregon.
