Mandy Walker ACS ASC was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2017.
Mandy Walker was born and raised in Bundoora, an outer suburb of Melbourne in 1963.
She became interested in photography while a student in high school, and after graduation she studied film criticism and cinema studies with John Flaus. She apprenticed as an assistant on several documentaries and music videos before shooting her first feature film, Return Home, at the age of twenty-five.
She has 29 screen credits including The Mountain Between Us, Hidden Figures, Parklands, The Well, Lantana, Australian Rules, Shattered Glass, and Australia.
Mandy Walker has filmed commercials for Nike, Toyota, Caltex, Cingular Wireless, Foxwoods Casino and, most notably, the spot for Chanel No. 5 :The Film directed by Baz Luhrmann and featuring Nicole Kidman.
She became a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2009 and is an Accredited member of the American Society of Cinematographers and the Australian Cinematographers Society, of which she has been a member since 1999. Mandy was the Kodak Artist in Residence at UCLA film school for the 2014-15 academic year, and in 2015 she received the Kodak Cinematography Mentor of the Year Award. For the John Curran-directed Tracks, Mandy won an Australian Cinematographers Society’s Gold Award and a Film Critics Circle of Australia Award while also earning a Best Cinematography nomination from the Australian Film Institute.
For Director Baz Luhrmann’s “Australia”, she received a Satellite Award, the Hollywood Cinematographer of the Year Award, and the Women in Film, Kodak Vision Award in 2008. Earlier in her career, Mandy garnered a Film Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Cinematography on the strength of director Billy Ray’s Shattered Glass (2003). Prior to that, her lensing of director Kathryn Millard’s Parklands (1996) won the Best Cinematography in a Non-Feature Film honor from the Australian Film Institute.
The Australian Cinematographers Society honored her with their Award of Distinction for Parklands and Lantana. She was nominated for the Australian Film Institute Award for Best Achievement in Cinematography for The Well, the Film Critics Circle of Australia Award for Best Cinematography for The Well and Lantana, and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Cinematography for Shattered Glass.
Mandy Walker is an inspirational woman and cinematographer and knows a thing or two about defying expectations. One of the movie industry’s very few female cinematographers, she decided at age 13 to become a DP. “My dad made me a little dark room in the back yard and I loved going to movies, so I decided to join those two things together.”
But there is much more to Mandy Walker and the films she has shot. She leads by example and encourages all young cinematographers to work hard and to question, question and question again. Her role as a woman in our industry has inspired many other young women to follow in her footsteps and pursue a career in the Camera Department, many with great success.
