Catherine Yrisarri is an award-winning documentary and commercial filmmaker. Her work has catalogued environmental wonder coupled with climate change, faith, politics, science and cinematic first-person stories around the world. Starting with National Geographic at 23, she's crafted the creative vision of series, campaigns and independent documentaries for Netflix, OWN, New York Times, National Geographic Channel and the Blue Chip series - Belief - Oprah calls “her life’s work.” She helped develop Participant Media’s immersive VR series on Climate Change that premiered at Tribeca while in tandem directing a film on emerging women in politics. Most recently, she returned from the UK filming the longitudinal history of our planet in caves with Rolex Laureate scientist Gina Moresley. Her media projects have taken her to over 50+ countries around the world with her work garnering the stamp of ‘Vimeo Staff Pick’, Sundance Audience Award and a National Emmy for best documentary amongst many others. It’s her love of people and curiosity about the world that fuels the excitement to creatively translate and share stories that reflect a richer, brighter world.
When not traveling around the world for work, she is studying the magic of plants and clinical herbalism or somewhere beautiful with her dog Rosey and friends and family.
Current projects in Development: Music documentary exploring our ancestral roots - JOIK, the film | Fashion Forward - the evolving female leadership in the fashion industry | Food Desert - series highlighting pioneers in the movement to revitalize our current food system + several others.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT:
My mentors have been vast and wide and helped cultivate a perspective on how we can care about the world around us and each other - a reciprocal relationship with the environment, land and people where we can be of service to each other and the planet. This not only helps companies and networks who are now trying to reframe their businesses and the stories told but also for audiences witnessing these narratives.
After years of covering intimate narratives globally, it is now vital to forage a new perspective of possibility - how we can all step in as individuals, companies, larger narratives on networks to share in a way that helps people to see within themselves and the wider world… the hope to reimagine a world in which we want to live. This all comes through story, commercials, narratives that inspire - a wild love of this world.