Elizabeth Dobson
agent: Natalie Spanier - natalie@sternwild.com
Elizabeth Dobson is an award winning BAFTA and Emmy nominated director working in specialist factual, arts, history and documentary. She has unrivalled experience working with global onscreen talent, from Stanley Tucci to Gwynneth Paltrow and the legendary Martin Sheen. She’s made films for US and UK broadcasters including Discovery, NBC and PBS, as well as BBC, ITV and C4. She has wide knowledge of the US, having lived and worked on the east and west coasts. She worked in LA as part of the team making the first US series of the iconic Who Do You Think You Are? for NBC.
She has a track record in getting her own ideas commissioned, including most recently a 3 part music series for Sky Arts Lenny Henry’s Got the Blues, featuring Van Morrison, Tinie Tempah and Sir Tom Jones.
She has extensive experience of working creatively with archive and is able to create multi-layered films that weave complex, disparate content into compelling, cinematic narrative, most recently working across the ambitious BBC series Icons: The Greatest Person of the 20th Century for 72 Films.
She also has experience directing unfolding narrative and is skilled at working with people in vulnerable situations, making series such as The Baby Race following single women trying to have children. She has worked on films dealing with everything from suicide to child bereavement, as well as trauma in WW1’s Secret Shame: A Century of PTSD.
Her approach to directing, regardless of genre, is to tell stories that reveal something about the world we live in by drawing out the human stories that lie at the heart of even the biggest global events.
She started her film career in investigative documentaries, working on numerous Emmy and Peabody winning films for US and UK broadcasters such as Red Files:Them & Us and Lockerbie: What Really Happened? This has given her a grounding in journalistic practice and rigour that is evident in her approach to every story she tells.