Producer and Director at AFIN

Biography

Ash Cottrell has worked in the film and television industry in a range of different roles and capacities over the last ten years. She began in the acting world in commercials and with guest roles on shows such as Neighbours. Prior to working in the film industry, Ash completed an undergraduate degree with majors in International Relations and Peace and Conflict Analysis that continues to inform her interest in the effects of protracted conflicts on a person’s mental health. She has an Honours degree in Film Theory from Monash University, where her thesis focussed on male anti-heroes in seventies New Hollywood cinema. She also holds a Masters of Producing from the Victorian College of the Arts, mentored by Gus Howard. Over the past five years, Ash has worked in production, assistant directing, accounts and the art department across feature films, television commercials and digital content. She is a freelance producer for a variety of production houses in Melbourne and works in both digital content as a director/producer and television commercial content as a producer. Most recently she produced the cooking series, The Chef’s Secret with celebrity chef, Adrian Richardson in Western Queensland. She has been in story rooms for television shows in development with the Australian Children’s Television Foundation and has worked directly for producers on Screen Australia funded comedy Web Series’, notably, Other People’s Problems, The Drop Off and The Listies Work for Peanuts. In the past year, Ash was the Art Department Coordinator on FIRES (ABC), Love Me (Foxtel Binge) and Savage River (ABC). She was also the Art Department Coordinator on the feature film High Ground and took on post-production roles working directly for Producer, Maggie Miles. Ash has worked extensively in Melbourne, in Far North Queensland (Celeste), rural Victoria (The Intolerant Cooks), Sydney and Red Hill (Ferrari) and Arnhem Land (High Ground). Throughout this diverse production experience, she remains committed to a career as a documentary filmmaker and has a particular interest in projects that focus on social justice issues. She is committed to visually stylistic documentaries with commercial appeal and infusing a narrative approach to the storytelling.