Irene Taylor is a renowned director and producer, boasting an impressive array of accolades, including Oscar nominations, multiple Emmy wins, duPont and Peabody awards.
Her most recent feature documentary, I AM: Celine Dion, premiered at Lincoln Center in June 2024 and subsequently became Amazon Prime's most popular documentary of all time, globally. This follows her earlier documentary, Trees and Other Entanglements, which explores humanity's fascination with the arboreal world and was released by HBO in 2023.
In 2022, Irene won a Columbia-DuPont Award for her poignant investigation into the Boy Scouts of America, Leave No Trace: A Hidden History of The Boy Scouts, which aired on ABC News Studios and Hulu. This comes after her 2019 documentary, Moonlight Sonata: Deafness in Three Movements, premiered at Sundance and was later nominated for a Special Merit in Documentary Filmmaking at the 2020 Primetime Emmy Awards.
Irene's personal story, woven throughout the documentary, revolves around her deaf son, her deaf father, and Ludwig Van Beethoven, who suffered from deafness while composing his famous sonata.
Irene's career in documentary filmmaking began in photojournalism, and her first feature film, Hear and Now, a documentary memoir about her deaf parents, won the Sundance Audience Award in 2007, a Peabody Award, and top honors at international film festivals. It was also nominated for Documentary of the Year by the Producers Guild of America in 2008.
Her HBO true-crime documentary, Beware the Slenderman, received multiple Emmy nominations in 2017 and two Critics' Choice Awards for Best Director and Best Documentary.
Irene's additional credits include several short films released by HBO, including The Final Inch, which was nominated for an Academy Award, multiple Emmys, and won the IDA's Pare Lorentz Award. She also directed Saving Pelican 895, which won an Emmy for its affecting music, and One Last Hug: Three Days at Grief Camp, which won the 2014 Prime Time Emmy for Best Children's Programming.
Her other notable works include Open Your Eyes, a documentary about an aging couple living in the Himalayas determined to regain their sight, and Between Sound and Silence, an opinion film exploring the impact of hearing technology on the human experience, released by The New York Times Op-Docs.
Irene's early career was marked by her work as a Himalayan Mountain guide and author in Kathmandu, Nepal. Her book, Buddhas in Disguise, served as the basis for her first documentary film, made in 1993 with UNICEF. She is a graduate of New York University and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, and was a producer for CBS Sunday Morning from 1998-2001. Irene founded Vermilion Films in 2006 and is a member of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and The Television Academy. She currently resides in Portland, Oregon.
