Tara Sutton is an award-winning filmmaker and journalist who tells intimate stories about people living in extraordinary circumstances, focusing most often on women and children.
Over the last 20 years she has covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Syrian refugee crisis, famine, the aftermath of genocide and female genital mutilation. She was the only unembedded western reporter to enter Fallujah, Iraq during the siege, and her GuardianFilms/Channel 4 documentary “Fallujah Forensics” which exposed war crimes committed by the US military won the Amnesty International Award for News.
Her documentary for the CBC “A War in Words: An Iraqi Family Diary” won the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association Rolls Royce Award for Exceptional News Feature, the Gold Chris award at Columbus and the audience award and the New York Film Festival. She has been a two time finalist for the Rory Peck Awards which honour bravery in cameramen. Her films have appeared on Channel 4 News, BBC Newsnight, National Geographic, the CBC, Discovery, Al Jazeera and her writing in The New Yorker and The Guardian. Her film for The Guardian “Summer Holiday Circumcision” which looked at girls being sent home to Somali from the UK for FGM was part of a successful campaign launched by the Guardian to lobby the UK government on behalf of at-risk girls.
She has appeared as a commentator on Al Jazeera, the CBC and BBC and speaks internationally on the plight of refugees in the Middle East. She is a founding board member of the Collateral Repair Project which assists the most vulnerable refugees of war in Amman, Jordan and a board member of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto.
In 1997 She was hired as one of the world’s first “videojournalists” by Broadcast News Networks and spent two years criss-crossing the United States making long-form observational documentaries for CBS and New York Times television. She has a M.Sc from The Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.