​MARGOT NASH
     Sydney Filmmaker, Screenwriter and Photographer
                                                    As If Productions                                                 

Margot Nash started out as an actor but quickly moved to film. She has produced, written and directed a number of award-winning films as well as working as a cinematographer and a film editor. She holds an MFA from the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. 

Her first film We Aim To Please made with performer Robin Laurie won a Jury Prize at the L’Homme Regarde Homme film festival in Paris in 1978. It is represented in Screen Worlds, a permanent exhibition about the history of the moving image in Australia at ACMI in Melbourne. In 2017 it was digitally restored by the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) and screened at the 2017 Sydney Film Festival. In 2022 it screened for two months in Berlin at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Germany's national centre for international contemporary arts in an exhibition called No Master Territories: feminist world building and the moving image. This exhibition moved to the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art in 2023. Other iterations followed.

Margot was co filmmaker and editor on the 1982 award-winning feature documentary For Love or Money about the history of women and work in Australia. For Love or Money was restored in by the NFSA and is still active in distribution.  It won a UN Media Peace prize in 1985. Her short documentary Teno won the Jury Prize for Direction and Best Documentary in the Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM) Awards in 1984.  Her short experimental drama Shadow Panic (1989) won an Australian Film Institute (AFI) Award for Best Cinematography, and an ATOM Award for Best Innovative Film. 

In 1994 Margot wrote and directed Vacant Possession for which she was nominated for Best Directing and Best Original Screenplay in the AFI awards. In 2021 Vacant Possession screened at the Melbourne International Film Festival in their Restoration program. Vacant Possession screened at Chicago, Hawaii and Asia Pacific and in 1996 won a Speciale Mention du Jury at the Films De Femmes festival in Créteil. In 1999 For Love Or Money, Shadow Panic and Vacant Possession screened as part of a ‘Tribute to Australian and NZ Women Filmmakers’ at the Films de Femmes de Créteil festival in Paris.  In 2005 Margot directed the feature drama Call Me Mum for SBS Independent.  Call Me Mum won two AFI Awards and was short-listed for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and the AWGIEs. 

Margot has worked as a consultant and a mentor for Indigenous filmmakers in Australia and the Pacific. In 2012 she was the Filmmaker in Residence at Zürich University of the Arts where she began developing her personal essay documentary The Silences (2015). In 2016 she won an Australian Writers’ Guild (AWGIE) Award for the screenplay. In 2016 the Melbourne Cinémathèque honoured Margot with a retrospective of her work. 

In 2019 she collaborated with Maori performace artist Victoria Hunt to produce TAKE a short dance drama about origins, trauma and colonial violence, which screened in the 2020 Biennale in Sydney. In 2021 she had a photographic exhibition called Songs for Gaia: earth, air, sea at Gallery East in Sydney. Her short film Undercurrents: meditations on power (2023) had its World Premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) and its international premiere at the Warsaw Film Festival.