Su Rynard (born 1961) is a Canadian film and television director, editor and video artist.[1] She is most noted as the director of the 2005 feature film Kardia,[2] which was the winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Feature Film Prize at the 2005 Hamptons International Film Festival.[3]
The niece of Canadian experimental filmmakers Michael Snow and Joyce Wieland,[4] she began her career as a video artist in the 1980s,[5] associated with Trinity Square Video[6] and the YYZ Gallery art collective.[7]
In the 1990s she had editing credits on Cynthia Roberts's films The Last Supper and Bubbles Galore,[8] and directed the short films Signal (1993), Big Deal, So What (1995),[9] Eight Men Called Eugene (1996),[10] and Strands (1997),[11] before graduating from the Canadian Film Centre in 1997.[12] Her short films, united by themes of the relationship between science and life, were also later screened together as the anthology package Life Tests.[13]
She released her full-length debut documentary Dream Machine, a profile of musician Roberta Michele, in 2000.[14] She subsequently worked on various documentary television series before releasing Kardia in 2005.[2] From 2008 to 2015, she directed numerous episodes of the documentary series Air Crash Investigation.
In 2015 she released the documentary film The Messenger, profiling the environmental threats to songbirds.[15] In 2021 she released Duet for Solo Piano, a profile of pianist Eve Egoyan.[16]
Her television documentary Reef Rescue, about efforts to save coral reefs from environmental destruction, was broadcast in 2020 as an episode of The Nature of Things,[17] and in 2021 as an episode of Nova.