Donna McRae

Donna McRae is undaunted by ‘swimming against the tide’. She works across colour, black & white, long takes and multi-channel video with exceptional fluency. Her particular interrogations of ghosts, 19th Century gender roles and post-punk rock n’ roll offer a surprising and powerful potential.

Donna’s first micro-budget feature, Johnny Ghost (2012), won seven awards and two Special Jury Prizes. Her video installations have screened in galleries internationally and she makes collaborative works and music videos with visual artist Michael Vale.

Her second micro budget supernatural feature Lost Gully Road (2017) has worldwide distribution, won Best Feature at three international film festivals and is sold to Channel 9. Her feature documentary Cobby: The Other Side of Cute (2018) toured the festival circuit and has distribution with LABEL. She is in development with the Acme Film Company on KATE KELLY, a ‘ghost’ Western which was selected for Frontiéres co-production market at Fantasia IFF in 2016. She is also working on a five part speculative fiction ghost story called Preservation and a ‘psycho biddy’ ghost story called Dawn. Donna has been nominated for Best Direction in a Feature Film for Lost Gully Road at the Australian Directors Guild awards in 2019.

Publication highlights include a chapter in Women Make Horror (2020) the award winning edited collection by Alison Pierse, and the forthcoming books The Punk Reader and Spoofing the Vampire, and a chapter in Ecozona with Michael Vale entitled “The Cutopia Paradox: Anthropomorphism as Entertainment”.

She lectures at Deakin University.