Athina Rachel Tsangari (she/her) is an award-winning filmmaker widely considered as a principal instigator of the Greek New Wave. She served as the projections designer and video director-producer for the 2004 Athens Summer Olympics opening and closing ceremonies, which won an EMMY for Best Live Broadcast. In 2009, she created the animation work “Reflections” (in-situ large-scale mapping projections) for the inauguration of the Acropolis Museum in Athens. She is the founder of Haos Film, a filmmaker-run company based in Athens. Among Haos’ producing credits are Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Kinetta” (2005), “Dogtooth” (2009), and “Alps” (2011), and co-producing on Richard Linklater’s “Before Midnight.” Tsangari has been filmmaker-in-residence at the Film Society of Lincoln Center; Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard, where she also taught as a visiting professor; DAAD artist-in-residence in Berlin, while working on her stage directorial debut, Wedekind’s “Lulu,” commissioned by the Salzburg Festival; and recipient of the 2017 Berliner Kunstpreis in Cinema, awarded by Berlin’s Academie der Künste. Her sophomore feature film “Attenberg” (2010), premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Best Actress ‘Coppa Volpi’ Award for Ariane Labed, a best female director prize across all Venice IFF sections, and further garnered several Best Film awards worldwide. “Chevalier” (2015) won Best Film at the BFI London Film Festival and was nominated for Best International Film at the Independent Spirit Awards. Both “Attenberg” and “Chevalier” were Greece’s submissions for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars.
Athina is currently in post on “Harvest,” for which she was awarded the Arte Europe Grand Accord. She was director and executive producer on the BBC2/HBO MAX series “Trigonometry” (2020) and recently directed two episodes of “Upload” for Amazon Prime Video (forthcoming). She has been Artistic Director of the annual Oxbelly Screenwriting and Directing Lab, and has taught cinema at Harvard’s AFVS, RTF at UT Austin, Béla Tarr’s Sarajevo Film Academy, Le Fresnoy Studio des Arts Contemporains, amongst others. She is a DGA and AMPAS member, has served as a jury member at Cannes, Berlin, Locarno, Sundance, and Toronto film festivals, and as jury president in Venice (Orizzonti), Götteborg, and BFI London.
