Susanna White is a BAFTA winning and multi-Emmy nominated screen director. Her wide-ranging body of work ranges from collaborations with Sir Tom Stoppard, David Simon, Steven Knight, Andrew Davies, and Emma Thompson.
Susanna’s work for the cinema includes ‘Woman Walks Ahead’ starring Jessica Chastain, Michael Greyeyes, Sam Rockwell, and Ciaran Hinds. Her debut feature, Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang’, starring Emma Thompson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dame Maggie Smith, Ralph Fiennes, and Ewan McGregor, was nominated for a BAFTA, and grossed over $100m worldwide. She went on to direct the John le Carré thriller, ‘Our Kind of Traitor’, adapted by Hossein Amini and again starring Ewan McGregor, this time alongside Stellan Skarsgaard, Naomie Harris, and Damien Lewis.
Susanna has a reputation for working with new talent. In television, she won widespread praise for her six episodes of ‘Bleak House’ which introduced the world to Carey Mulligan, the series itself winning a host of international broadcast accolades including the BAFTA and RTS awards for Best Drama Serial. Susanna went on to work on ‘Jane Eyre’ for the BBC, which gave a breakthrough role to Ruth Wilson who won the Golden Globe and Emmy for her performance. This highly regarded drama series also earned Susanna an Emmy nomination for directing. For HBO, she helmed ‘Generation Kill’, written by David Simon, which provided Alexander Skarsgård with his first major television lead; the drama was nominated for 13 Emmy awards including Outstanding Directing.
Susanna worked on the last two series of David Simon's ‘The Deuce’ starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, and for FX she helmed the finale of ‘Trust’, written by Simon Beaufoy and starring Donald Sutherland, Harris Dickinson, and Hilary Swank. Susanna also directed the critically lauded ‘Parade’s End’ adapted for television by Sir Tom Stoppard from the novels by Ford Madox Ford and starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Rebecca Hall. Susanna has also helmed episodes of ‘Boardwalk Empire’ and ‘Billions’.
Susanna is also Emmy nominated for her work in documentaries, including ‘Tell Me the Truth About Love’ about the poet WH Auden, the multi-award winning ‘Volvo City’, about the Hasidic Jewish community of North London, and most recently, ‘TS Eliot: Into the Waste Land’ commissioned to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the BBC.
Having recently directed three major episodes of the Star Wars series, ‘Andor’ for Disney+ Susanna’s latest work is as lead director and executive producer on the TV adaptation of Edith Wharton’s ‘The Buccaneers’ for The Forge, which has just released on Apple TV+. Susanna also recently directed Ewan McGregor in a European-wide commercial campaign for Volkswagen Electric ID-7.
