Chelsea Winstanley

Member, Friends of AUT Inc.
Producer, Director

An award-winning film producer and director, Chelsea Winstanley completed her first project in the USA as a director on the film Little King in 2018. She recently produced the acclaimed feature documentary Merata: How Mum Decolonised the Screen, which premiered at the NZ International Film Festival followed by screenings at the Sundance Film Festival and Berlin in 2019. It was subsequently acquired by Ava DuVernay’s Array for distribution in North America.

Chelsea also produced the hit vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows, directed by Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement, among other highly successful narrative and documentary films.

Chelsea graduated top of her class from AUT in 2003 with a Bachelor of Communications majoring in Television and was the recipient of the TV3 Award for Excellence in Documentary Production, the Panasonic NZ Ltd Award for Excellence in Corporate Community Videos and the Television New Zealand Award for Television Graduate of the Year.

Chelsea has received a number of awards in the film industry including the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (LAAPFF), the Grand Prix Jury Prize Best Film, the Māoriland Film Festival Audience Award for Waru in 2018, the NZ Writers Guild SWANZ Awards (Script Writer Awards New Zealand) in 2017 and Best Screenplay Award for Waru and the Denver Film Critics Society Award in 2016.

She currently lives in Los Angeles where she masters the fine juggling act of film making and motherhood.