“Playing with Sharks” director.
Sally Aitken is an Emmy® nominated director and writer, and a Show Runner of multiple international series. She is known for adventurous collaborations, and her work is characterised by compassion, humour and a fierce intelligence. Her formidable directing slate includes some of the most talked about and highest rating screen content for broadcasters around the globe, delivering hours of original programming to BBC, ABC, SBS, C4, Channel7, CBC, PBS, Nat Geo, Foxtel, Discovery, the History Channel, ZDF, Arte, and TVNZ. Sally’s award-winning work includes the Camera d'Or nominated feature documentary A Cinematic Life selected for the Cannes Film Festival and the 3x60mins Stories of Australian Cinema (ABC) that Sally also wrote and directed, scoring 1.1m viewers per ep, nominated for an International Emmy®.
Most recently Sally has finished series producing, directing and co-writing The Pacific with Sam Neill, (Foxtel/Prime/Sky) a 6x60mins epic with the actor travelling the largest ocean in the world to discover the indigenous perspective on Captain Cook’s voyages. The much-lauded series has quickly become the highest rating series on Foxtel’s History Channel since2013. Other major work includes helming 9x director crews through an 8-part ambitious social experiment The Week The Women Went, (CBC), wrangling the iconoclast starchitect in Getting Frank Gehry (2015, BBC/ABC), conceiving Air Rescue (5th season, Channel7), the first fully brand funded success series in Australia and writing and directing Streets of Your Town (2016, ABC) a 2x60mins romp with comedian Tim Ross, for which Sally collected both the Australian Director’s Guild award as well as the Australian Writer’s Award for Best Documentary series.
