David Winning

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David Winning
Film Director
Born	May 8, 1961 (1961-05-08) (age 47) Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Occupation	director, producer, screenwriter, and actor
Official website

David Winning (born May 8, 1961 in Calgary, Alberta) is a Canadian-born film and television director.

1 Biography
2 2008 Hawaii Career Award
3 Selected filmography
4 External links

[edit] Biography

He is mainly known for his work on Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda, MGM’s Stargate: Atlantis, ABC’s Dinotopia and the HBO thriller Exception to the Rule, starring Kim Cattrall and Eric McCormack. Winning became a dual Citizen of the US and Canada in 2003 and lives in Los Angeles. He was making films at the age of ten with a Super 8 camera in hometown Calgary, Canada. At age 18, he got a Canada Council grant in 1979 to make his first sixteen millimeter drama Sequence, and expanded the plotline into his first feature film Storm, produced in the summer of 1983 and filmed in the forests and hills of Bragg Creek, Alberta. The debut feature took four years to complete and was released by Golan-Globus' Cannon Films International and Warner Home Video in 1988.

At 27, he landed directing gigs on the Canadian-produced series Friday the 13th: The Series for CBS Paramount Television; for this television debut he received three Gemini Award nominations. His second feature followed in 1992 with Killer Image, a plot-twisting photographic mystery-thriller starring Michael Ironside and M. Emmet Walsh.

Throughout the 1990's and 2000's he directed more movies and episodes of over twenty series from kid’s shows to westerns to science-fiction. M. Night Shyamalan has cited Winning's episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark?, The Tale of the Dream Girl, as the inspiration for The Sixth Sense. [1] His episodic work has received international awards including seventeen first place golds/platinums overall at the 1992-2007 Houston Film Festival/WorldFest, the 1995 Gold Hugo Award and two Silver Hugos from the Chicago International Film Festival, and Four national Gemini Award nominations for Best Director/Dramatic Series. In 2002 he received a National award from the Directors Guild of Canada for outstanding achievement in television drama. He was nominated again for this award in 2006.

Nineteen years of episodic production has included the Showtime/Disney western anthology Dead Man's Gun, the USA Network series Matrix with Carrie-Anne Moss (unrelated to the film of the same name), and the television pilot and first six episodes of the UPN/Fox series Breaker High with Ryan Gosling.

In the summer of 1996 he re-teamed with Michael Ironside and Frederic Forrest for the Universal Studios military thriller One of Our Own. His last theatrical release, Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie for 20th Century Fox, was the fourth highest selling video in the U.S. in August 1997 (Billboard magazine).

Winning spent the fall of 1997 shooting in Scotland with Jason Connery on the Merlin project. Next he directed the Patrick Duffy/Pam Dawber thriller Don’t Look Behind You which premiered to two million viewers on the Fox Family Channel. More recently he has divided time between features and episodic work on Twice in a Lifetime, Earth: Final Conflict, Stargate Atlantis, Andromeda and ABC's Dinotopia; location shooting for three months in Budapest, Hungary. His Stargate: Atlantis Season One episode for MGM, Childhood's End won 3 international awards for Direction in 2005; New York, Houston and Chicago. In 2006 he finished Past Sins for Lifetime Television with Lauralee Bell and the television pilot and multiple episodes of Dinosapien for BBC and Discovery Channel.

Past Sins for Lifetime Television premiered in July 2006. Most recently Winning directed Kevin Sorbo, Robert Englund, and Bruce Dern in a Trilogy of monster movies for the Sci Fi Channel (United States) and Hallmark Entertainment (RHI Films New York) and episodes of the new Vampire series "Blood Ties" for Lifetime Television.

[edit] 2008 Hawaii Career Award

Winning was honored at the 2008 Big Island Film Festival in Hawaii. He received a Special Career award on May 17, 2008 with a reception in his honor the same night. SWAMP DEVIL also won the Golden Honu for Best Foreign feature film. A doublebill of his two recent monster movies was also presented at the festival; SWAMP DEVIL starring Bruce Dern and BLACK SWARM starring Robert Englund. In April 2008, Winning won 2 awards at the Houston Film Festival/WorldFest in Texas and a Special Jury Award for his work on the Lifetime vampire series "Blood Ties". BLACK SWARM is also screening at the Boston Film Festival on Friday the 13th of June, 2008. Both films were produced in Montreal by Muse Entertainment and RHI Entertainment, New York.