Catherine Rierson – Bio

Catherine Rierson is an award-winning filmmaker based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. As an independent creative producer, she works closely with directors of both narrative and documentary film to realize projects from their inception to release. With a strong journalistic background, her work, often observational and lyrical in approach, examines the relationship between identity and sense of place.

Currently, Catherine is producing Greg Jeske’s feature documentary, Southbound, a work-in-progress film backed by the International Documentary Association (IDA) about domestic migration’s reshaping of the American South, and field producing several short docuseries for television. Catherine’s most recent release as a producer was Mossville: When Great Trees Fall, a documentary about one Louisiana man’s stand against the petrochemical industry. Since its Spring 2019 premiere at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Mossville has won numerous awards and accolades, including Full Frame Documentary Film Festival’s Kathleen Bryan Edwards Award for Human Rights, Montclair Film Festival’s David Carr Award for Truth in Nonfiction Storytelling, Montclair Film Festival’s Junior Jury Award, and the Rainier Independent Film Festival’s Best Doc Award, among others.

She also recently worked on the producing team behind Vivian Howard’s new PBS show, “Somewhere South”, as well as co-produced 40 Days and 40 Nights (2020) – an IFP Forum-participating film sponsored by JustFilms and the Bertha Foundation – about poverty and the people fighting to end it, as well as produced two recently-released narrative shorts, Stella for Star (2019) and Quiet and Clear (2019). Prior to this, Catherine worked as a local producer for the "Cajun Mardi Gras” episode of “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown.” Among other documentary TV shows and branded content commercial work, she has produced the Guggenheim Foundation-grantee documentary, Sick to Death (2017); the narrative short, The Executioner (2015); and the award-winning documentary, Big Charity (2015).

With a degree in Journalism and Mass Communication earned from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010, Catherine has garnered extensive experience with nonfiction storytelling and seeks to meld her background in editorial journalism to filmic arts. She has completed course work at the renowned Institut d'Études Politiques in Paris, France, as well as at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies.