Lea Nakonechny is originally from a village of 77 souls in rural southwest Saskatchewan. She studied film at Concordia University and the University of Regina, winning several awards for her student work. Her first major effort, Two Museums (2005), won the Artistic Vision Award at the 2006 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival and toured Saskatchewan cinemas during the provincial Centennial.
Her short fiction film, Edge of the Desert (2009) premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and went on to screen at a dozen other festivals around the world. Her feature-length script Nowhere Road which she developed at WIDC in Banff, was a semi-finalist in the 2011 Slamdance Screenplay Competition, a “Second-Rounder” in the 2012 Austin Film Festival Screenplay Competition and was chosen as one of four Canadian projects to participate in the prestigious IFP No Borders co-production market in New York City in September 2013.
Lea’s work explores themes of identity and place, often using landscape as a dramatic element. She is a recipient of the Telefilm Canada New Voices Award (in conjunction with the 2014 Toronto Screenwriting Conference), winner of the San Francisco Film Society’s 2014 Djerassi Screenwriting Fellowship, and was one of eight director participants in the 2012-2013 Banff Centre’s Women In the Director’s Chair program. She lives in Montreal with her husband Simon and daughter Romy.