Tara Sutton
Award-Winning Video Journalist
Award-winning filmmaker and war correspondent Tara Sutton has reported from many of the world’s most troubled places and received international acclaim for her brave, daring and emotional documentaries. Sutton is the only Canadian female journalist who was based full-time in Iraq from the start of the war. Driving across the desert as Iraq fell and Baghdad burned, her coverage of the ensuing years in Iraq was shown around the world from Holland to Japan and London to Toronto. Her feature film, A War in Words, An Iraqi Family Diary which aired on the CBC received the Common Wealth Broadcasting Associations Rolls Royce Award for Exceptional New Feature.
Award-winning filmmaker and war correspondent Tara Sutton has reported from many of the world’s most troubled places and received international acclaim for her brave, daring and emotional documentaries. Working alone she shoots, produces and reports all her own films and is known for seeking out the stories of ordinary people, primarily women and children, living through horrific and extraordinary events.
Sutton is the only Canadian female journalist who was based full-time in Iraq from the start of the war. Driving across the desert as Iraq fell and Baghdad burned, her coverage of the ensuing years in Iraq was shown around the world from Holland to Japan and London to Toronto. Working freelance, she was not under the same security constraints as other reporters and this enabled her to access part of the country deemed unsafe by the private security firms large media outlets used in Iraq.
Sutton was the first journalist to enter Falluja after the American siege, when wearing a veil disguised as a native she slipped past the American soldiers guarding the city. She spent the next few weeks sneaking into Falluja where she documented war crimes and human rights abuses by the American military. The film she produced for the UK’s Guardian Films won the Amnesty International Television News Award. She has also twice been a finalist for the Rory Peck Awards in London, an honour granted to camera people in war zones.
She has also reported on famine and orphans in Ethiopia, women’s education in Afghanistan and a host of human rights related topics from such places as Colombia, Darfur, Liberia, Gabon, Jordan, Uganda and Cambodia. Sutton was chosen by the International Committee of the Red Cross to make a series of films for them titled “Women in War” and travelled with the group to conflict zones around the world.
Sutton has been a speaker both in Canada and overseas. In Toronto, she was part of the Women of Courage Speakers series and has spoken a at Medicine Sans Frontiers-led conference on reporting from conflict zones. She is also a guest commentator on CBC radio’s The Current, CBC Nightly News and CBC News Sunday in Canada and on Al Jazeera International and BBC television and radio.
Her feature film, A War in Words, An Iraqi Family Diary which aired on the CBC received the Common Wealth Broadcasting Associations Rolls Royce Award for Exceptional New Feature.
Before turning into international reporting, Sutton was one of the first videojournalists when she was chosen for to be part of the groundbreaking CBS documentary series I-Witness. She criss-crossed America living in the lives of the homeless, poligamists, ambulance drivers and many others. Based in New York for 13 years her work appeared on The Learning Channel, A&E, MTV and she hosted and produced her own travel show for Discovery. She has written for GQ, The Globe and Mail and New York Magazine.
Sutton holds a Masters in Journalism from Columbia University and a BA from University of Toronto.
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