Ингрид Венингер: Канадтық кино өнерінің шебері

Canadian actress, film director and screenwriter

Ingrid Veninger (born August 21, 1968) is a Canadian actress, writer, director, producer, and film professor at York University. Veninger began her career in show business as a child actor in commercials and on television; as a teen, she was featured in the CBC series Airwaves (1986–1987) and the CBS series Friday the 13th: The Series (1987–1990). In the 1990s, she branched out into producing, and, in 2003, she founded her own production company, pUNK Films, through which she began to work on her own projects as a writer and director. In 2013, she won an EDA Award from the Alliance of Women Film Journalists at the Whistler Film Festival. The Globe and Mail has dubbed Veninger "The DIY Queen of Canadian Filmmaking".

Veninger was born in Bratislava, before immigrating to Canada in the 1970s with her parents. Veninger got her start in show business in an advertisement for Bell Canada with Megan Follows at age 11.

As a teen actress, Veninger appeared in a number of films and television series, including the CBC comedy drama series Airwaves (1986–1987) and the popular horror series Friday the 13th: The Series (1987–1990). In 1989, at the age of 21, Veninger branched out into producing by optioning the rights to Margaret Atwood's novel Cat’s Eye. She also worked as an assistant director on Atom Egoyan's The Adjuster (1991) and produced Jeremy Podeswa’s Gemini nominated music documentary Standards (1992), and Peter Mettler's northern lights documentary Picture of Light (1994). As an actress, she has worked with Meryl Streep, Holly Hunter, Jackie Burroughs, among others.

In 2000, after working for most of the 1990s as an actress (including a recurring role on the Canadian action series La Femme Nikita), Veninger attended the Canadian Film Centre, where she produced fellow student Julia Kwan’s award winning short film, Three Sisters on Moon Lake (2001), which played at Sundance and the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). In 2003, Veninger founded her production company, pUNK Films, and began to work on her own projects as a writer and director. She is a frequent collaborator of Canadian filmmaker and actor Charles Officer, having worked on numerous projects with him, including the short film Urda/Bone, which screened at the New York Film Festival in 2003 and Nurse. Fighter. Boy (2008) which premiered at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival. The short film was later picked up for distribution by Mongrel Media. Her fourth film The Animal Project (2013) screened at numerous festivals, including in the Contemporary World Cinema section at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. The film received mostly positive reviews, with Norm Wilner of NOW Magazine writing that "the reigning queen of lo fi Canadian cinema has upped her game without abandoning any of her characteristic whimsy". The Torontoist dubbed Veninger the "godmother of Toronto’s D. I. Y. filmmaking scene". The film is currently available for purchase on Vimeo. In 2013, as she accepted an EDA Award from the Alliance of Women Film Journalists for The Animal Project at the Whistler Film Festival, Veninger asked the audience for help funding the Femmes Lab, a workshop she was spearheading to produce 6 female directed feature films for $6,000. She said the $6,000 investment would not only fund six screenplays to be finished by June, it would guarantee the donor first look at the completed scripts. "The room was stone silent", recalled Veninger. Oscar winning actress Melissa Leo ended up volunteering and put up the money, and the TIFF Bell Lightbox offered workshop space. For her fifth feature film, He Hated Pigeons, Veninger raised over $36,000 from 175 backers on Indiegogo. After production, she toured with the film at numerous festivals around the world. In 2017, Veninger's sixth film, Porcupine Lake, was screened in the Contemporary World Cinema section at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival. The film was based on the script Veninger wrote through her Melissa Leo funded Femmes Lab, and was also funded in part by Telefilm. Veninger went into production on her seventh feature film on May 22, 2018, in Barcelona; the film is tentatively titled Before We Think and will be filmed in several different cities, including Whitehorse, Toronto, Wilmington, among others.

Veninger has been married to film composer John Switzer since 1990. They have two children: Hallie and Jacob, both artists. In addition to filmmaking, Veninger works as a part time contract faculty member at York University.