Join Us

Ondi Timoner (1969-) is an American film director, producer and editor. She is the only director, along with her team, to win a Sundance grand jury award twice in the festival’s history.

Timoner graduated cum laude from Yale University and founded Interloper in 1995, and in 2004 incorporated it with Vasco Nunes into Interloper Films, LLC. She filmed the documentaries Voices From Inside Time about incarcerated women in Connecticut, winner of the Yale Film Prize – and later, The Nature of the Beast, about one woman’s heroic journey through the criminal justice system, and winner of the Bettina Russel Grand Jury Prize in Canada and The National Society for Visual Anthropology Commendation, which aired on PBS. She later went on to shoot Dam Nation, set in the oldest living civilization of sub-Saharan Africa about a WTO dam.

She created and directed for the TV series Sound Affects, the highest-rated pilot in VH1’s history, and ABC’s highly successful Switched!. Through Interloper she has made music videos and music documentaries for The Dandy Warhols, The Vines, Paul Westerberg, Lucinda Williams, Vanessa Carlton, The Jonas Brothers, and DMC, among others.

While filming music videos and documentaries for Interloper, Timoner simultaneously produced, directed, and edited DIG!, which chronicles seven years of the lives of two neo-psychedelic bands, The Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre. After its release in 2004, the film won the Grand Jury Prize 2004 at the Sundance Film Festival, and is now part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.

Timoner has completed several other documentaries; Recycle, co-directed with Vasco Nunes, winner at the ICG Awards, and presented at Sundance, Cannes, and Silverdocs; Join Us, a documentary about mind control in the United States, “We Live In Public”, all produced along with Vasco Nunes. Timoner has since also directed commercials for McDonalds, State Farm, DeVry, the US Army and Ford.

Timoner debuted We Live In Public at the Sundance Film Festival. The film considers some of the darker effects of modern media and technology on our personal identity through an examination of “the greatest internet pioneer you’ve never heard of”, Josh Harris. The dot-com millionaire had an affinity for expensive fascist-themed social experiments that eventually led to his mental breakdown. We Live In Public won the Grand Jury Prize award in the U.S. documentary category at the Sundance Film Festival.

Ondi Timoner is slated to direct a narrative feature film based on the life of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. She is co-producing the picture with actress Eliza Dushku, in conjunction with Dushku’s production company, Boston Diva Prods.. "Patti Smith just came out with a book called Just kids about her relationship with Mapplethorpe, " says Timoner. “It was a very interesting dynamic that they had in their youth. He was a very vital artist and a cultural lightening rod that really pushed the limits.” —Wikipedia