Darlene Johnson is a Dunghutti woman from Belbrook, a small bush town on the mid north coast of New South Wales. She is a filmmaker who started her career as a writer/director with the film "Two Bob Mermaid", which was inspired by her Aboriginal mother's experiences growing up under the assimilation policies of the 1950s.
Her film was shortlisted for the Baby Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival and was the first Indigenous Australian film to screen at the festival. It went on to win Best Australian Short film at the Australian Film Critics Circle of Australia and Best Short Film at the Asia Pacific Film Festival.
Darlene then turned to documentary filmmaking, writing and directing "Stolen Generations", which was nominated for an International EMMY Award and an AFI Award. Her other films include "Stranger in My Skin", "Following the Rabbit-Proof Fence", "Gulpilil - One Red Blood", and "Crocodile Dreaming", which was nominated for a Deadly Award and an IF Award.
Darlene's poetic and moving portrait, "River of No Return", about the complexities of living in a remote Indigenous community in the Northern Territory, was selected as the opening night film at the imagineNATIVE Film Festival in Toronto, the world's largest Indigenous Film Festival.
She has also directed and produced documentaries for the MESSAGE STICK series for ABC TV and wrote, directed, and produced the independent documentary, "The Redfern Story", which was broadcast on the ABC and nominated for the Documentary Australia Foundation Award for Best Documentary at the Sydney Film Festival.
Darlene's AACTA-nominated short film "Bluey" premiered at the Sydney Film Festival in 2015 and won the Event Cinema Award for Best Screenplay, going on to win 13 awards at numerous Australian and international festivals.
In 2018, Darlene was the first recipient of the Inaugural Shadow Directorship, an Australian Director's Guild and Screen Australia's Gender Matters Initiative, where she directed on the serial "Home and Away" followed by episodes on "The Heights" for Matchbox Pictures, "Neighbours", and "Born to Spy" for Aquarius Films.
In 2019, Darlene won the Inaugural Australian International Screen Scholarship in New York City, which was awarded by the International Screen Forum and the American Australian Association. She was also selected for the Screen NSW & Australians in Film (AiF) Charlie's Talent Escalator Lab and received a special grant from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) to participate in the lab and to facilitate the trip to LA.
Darlene recently received an Australian Director's Guild Award nomination for her directing work on "The Heights", her third ADG nomination.
