Ondi Timoner is the producer/director of The Nature of the Beast. A Theater Studies/American Studies Double Major who graduated from Yale University cum laude in 1994, she has to her credit a series of successful productions of socially relevant theater and video projects with a feminist and activist slant. Founder of the Yale Street Theater Troupe (1992) a guerrilla theater ensemble that gave spontaneous performances in unexpected surroundings, Ms. Timoner made her directorial stage debut in 1993 with an innovative production of Sarah Daniels’ Masterpieces, a play exploring sexual harassment in the workplace and the representation of women in art and the media.
Her growing enthusiasm for video resulted in a series of acclaimed documentary projects in which Ms. Timoner further explored her interest in power relations between men and women within a mass media-saturated Home Use society. These include 3000 Miles and a Video Camera, for which Ms. Timoner traveled across the country with a small production staff and interviewed 49 people in the toll booths, gas stations, convenience stores, restaurants, and city streets of America; Reflections On A Moment, which explores her generation’s media-influenced and romanticized notions of the nineteen sixties; and The Purple Horizon, a 60-minute documentary on the 1993 National Gay Pride March in Washington, D.C. More recently, Ms. Timoner has produced and directed Voices From Inside Time, winner of the Howard Lamar Film Prize for Best Undergraduate Film at Yale University (1994) and winner of the New Haven Special Jury Prize for excellence in independent documentary filmmaking.
In Voices From Inside Time Ms. Timoner challenges our society’s perception of female criminal offenders by interviewing a number of inmates at a women’s prison and allowing them to express their feelings about themselves, society, and the criminal justice system. It was during the production of this documentary that Ms. Timoner met Bonnie Jean Foreshaw, the main subject of her present production, The Nature of the Beast. Ms Timoner has worked as an Assistant Producer for NBC Media Services, Burbank; she has been an intern for Helen Whitney and as such worked on the PBS documentary, The Evil Within; she also held a position as the Assistant Regional Coordinator for the Steven Spielberg Holocaust/Oral History Project in Miami, Florida.
More recently, Ms. Timoner has garnered critical praise for her direction of the feature-length documentaries DIG!, and We Live in Public, which both were awarded the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, in 2004 and 2008 respectively.
