Nadia Tass
Nadia Tass is one of Australia’s most iconic directors of stage and screen, having garnered 68 international awards for her work, including the Screen Leader Award for Outstanding Leadership, Achievement and Services to the Screen Industry. She’s the director of Australian classics Malcolm, The Big Steal, Amy, and Matching Jack, and has directed films and television series for the BBC, CBS, Disney, Universal Studios, and Warner Bros, including The Miracle Worker and three American Girl movies.
Nadia’s experience as a theatre director is extensive and diverse, ranging from improvised, classic, contemporary, and musical theatre. Amongst her work, she has directed the American plays Disgraced by Ayad Akhtar, The Other Place by Sharr White for MTC, and Queensland theatre, Annie Baker’s the Flick and The Aliens, an adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and Masterpieces by Heather McDonald for Signature Theatre in Washington DC. Her latest theatre work was Fern Hill by Michael Tucker in November 2019 in NYC. She also directed commercial musicals Promises, Promises and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, which toured Australia, New Zealand, and Asia.
She was honoured by the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles with a retrospective of her work, and there have been retrospectives in Cape Town, India, and Moscow.
Nadia is currently working on a feature documentary in Los Angeles, on The Oleg Vidov Story, the Russian actor who defected from the USSR and came to America. It’s the story of his escape and how he teamed up with Mikhail Baryshnikov to bring classic Russian animation to the rest of the world.
David Parker
Parker – as he is most commonly known - is a renaissance man. His working life has been a mix of photographer, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and director of film and TVCs. He has a strong mechanical bend and his comedic skills are well known in his writing and his irreverent speeches.
After dropping out of Engineering at Queensland University, Parker journeyed in a 1949 Riley, firstly to Mt Isa to mine and then to Melbourne to study photography. As a stills photographer he shot film,TV, theatre and legendary musicians throughout the 1970s including the Beatles, ABBA, ACDC, Skyhooks and his beloved Mondo Rock. In 1986, he wrote, shot, and produced his first movie, Malcolm (1986), directed by his wife, Nadia Tass. Malcolm was a critical and box office hit. Those set of skills continued with Rikky and Pete (Gold ACS award for cinematography, The Big Steal (AFI award for Best Screenplay), Amy (Cannes Junior winner) and Matching Jack (Best Picture, Best Screenplay Milan International Film Festival).
David worked for Francis Ford Coppola on the TV pilot of his spin-off of The Outsiders, then shot Pure Luck for Universal with Danny Glover and Martin Short. David produced Hotel de Love for Village Roadshow and Irresistible with Susan Sarandon, and Emily Blunt. He has directed feature films most famously the cult hit Hercules Returns.
David was a Commissioner of the Australian Film Commission in the mid 90s and a board member of Film Victoria from 2011 to 2019. He also sat on Film Victoria’s Evaluation Advisory Committee.