Directing for the Screen

Catherine Eaton is an award-winning writer, director, producer, and actor whose films have screened at over 100 film festivals worldwide. Eaton was selected as a shadowing-director for Ryan Murphy's Half Program and for Tribeca Film Festival's Through Her Lens director's lab and grant. Eaton is a Statera mentee under showrunner Kit Steinkellner and an inaugural Avalon: Story Fellow 2021. Eaton directed and co-wrote the feature The Sounding—starring Harris Yulin (Ozark) and Frankie Faison (The Wire)— which won over two dozen awards on the festival circuit, is distributed by HBO in 25 countries and is available domestically on Amazon and Apple TV. It was also nominated for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) Voice Awards, in partnership with the Writers Guild of American (WGA) and Directors Guild of American (DGA), for activism and advocacy. Eaton's pilot Free Radical—based on her experience working with freelance news crews in conflict zones—was selected for The Gotham/IFP's Project Forum. Eaton is a director and writer at Next Chapter Podcasts where she has directed seven fiction episodes and written and adapted 36 episodes in collaboration with Marcus Gardley (The Chi and The Color Purple) and Oscar-winner Jeffrey Witty (Can You Ever Forgive Me). She also wrote and directed the pilot episode for the utopian fiction podcast The Light Ahead. She creates content for MSG's Garden of Dreams Foundation and shares an Emmy with the production team on The Human Toll of Ethanol (Bloomberg TV). As an actor, she has performed on Broadway, in television and film. Eaton teaches screen directing and the art of the pitch at Harvard Division of Continuing Education. She is Latinx (Paraguayan) and French-American, and many of the story shapes from her upbringing show up in her work.