Luned Tonderai

(She/Her)

Luned’s breakthrough project is the documentary mini-series Miriam: Death of a Reality Star.

Luned Tonderai grew up in a small working class Welsh town, without a clear path to the screen industries, and has gone on to forge a successful career in the male-dominated world of documentary directing.

Her own childhood love for storytelling was bolstered by competing at Wales’ annual National Eisteddfod, before she landed her first industry job as a TV researcher. She then moved into producing, with a goal to direct, earning her first directorial credit on an episode of 24 Hours in Police Custody (2015), a series she also helped to produce. The following year, she won the C4 ‘First Cut’ Director’s competition and directed the coming-of-age single, White Kid Brown Kid. Now working as a Series Director, her most recent work includes the documentary mini-series Miriam: Death of a Reality Star (2024, Channel 4). Here, Luned revisits and retells the tragic story of Miriam Rivera, the world’s first trans reality TV star. Through revealing interviews and Miriam’s own personal archive, this time Miriam’s story is told with great sensitivity and care.

In their own words…

“I knew from an early age that I wanted to do something creative, because that was where my strengths were… But my parents were teachers who barely watched TV, and the world of documentaries felt very remote from the community I grew up in, so I thought it was a pipedream… One of the things that drove me on was there wasn’t many female directors. There are more now, but there certainly wasn’t in my generation and that made me dig my heels in a bit more… I like to think there’s [also] room for a Welsh speaking female director, from a working class town to be heard within that space.”