Nadia Litz is an award-winning actress turned filmmaker. She debuted at Cannes in Jeremy Podeswa's Genie award-winning film The Five Senses. She played Sam Shepard's daughter in 2002's After The Harvest and was nominated for a Gemini Award for Best Actress for that role. In 2007, she won the Vancouver's Critics Award for her role in Reg Harkema's Money Warfare. While acting, she pursued a Film Theory degree from York University. She was welcomed as a student to the Berlinale Talent Campus, 2009. Months later, she was accepted as a Director-In-Residence at Norman Jewison's highly competitive post-graduate school, the Canadian Film Center. While there she directed the 35 mm short film, How To Rid Your Lover Of A Negative Emotion Caused By You! That film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2010. Since then, the short has played over a dozen film festivals internationally, including out-of-competition at Cannes Court Metrage 2011. It won best short at Austin's Fantastic Fest 2011 and in 2012 it was featured on the prestigious Wholphin anthology, alongside new work by Jay Duplass . For TIFF 2011, Litz earned a spot as a director in the coveted TIFF Talent Lab lead by Jason Reitman and the late Bingham Ray. In May of 2012 Litz's made an alternative short portrait called The Frame with Adrienne Clarkson, on Canada's former Governor General which will make it's world premiere at VIFF in September 2012. In July 2012, veteran Canadian indie producer Ingrid Veninger challenged award-winning filmmakers to make a feature film for $1000. In two weeks Litz wrote the feature Hotel Congress, which was then awarded the green light prize to shoot. Together with CFC alum Michel Kandinsky, actor Philip Riccio she wrote, directed, produced and starred in her first feature, which was shot in less than 40 hours in Tucson, Arizona. Litz is in development with Telefilm Canada/Scythia Films on her feature The People Garden.
On the importance of making cool films for young women Nadia Litz said: "As a young woman, films like Sofia Coppolas The Virgin Suicides and Lynne Ramsays Morvern Callar meant a great deal to me. They were spellbinding like other films I was discovering at the time by directors like David Lynch and Jim Jarmusch. But they were female-centric. I felt like they spoke directly to me as a young woman in a way that I craved growing up.".
A champion high school debater while attending St. Johnss Ravenscourt, Litz was once judged in a national debate competition by Justin Trudeau who went on to become the Prime Minister of Canada.
