August 2004

Chris Eyre (Cheyenne/Arapaho) directs for film and television. Smoke Signals, his first feature film, was distributed by Miramax and was one of the five highest-grossing independent films in 1998. A classic story of a man coming to terms with his father, Smoke Signals won the Audience Award and Eyre received the Filmmaker's Trophy at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. Eyre also received the Land Grant Award at the 1998 Taos Talking Pictures Festival. His other films include A Thief of Time and Skinwalkers, based on the novels of Tony Hillerman, for the PBS series Mystery!. In 1995, Eyre received a Rockefeller Foundation Intercultural Film Fellowship. While studying for his MFA in Film and Television at New York University (NYU), Eyre won Best Film in the NYU First Run Festival and also won the Martin Scorsese Post Production Award.

" With my work I like the shades: very rarely are our thoughts really black or white except in the case of our own bias and the limitations of our own experience. We tend to be so limited in our perceptions of what AMERICA is. We don’t know about our own history, about being real with those that aren’t of us. We need some more social/shared understanding and laughter. There is no one truth to our diversity."

Screened by NMAI

• We Shall Remain: Tecumseh (2008) director
• Imprint (2007) producer
• A Thousand Roads (2005) director
• A Thief of Time (Mystery!) (2003) director
• Edge of America (2003) director
• Skins (2002) director, co-producer, actor
• The Doe Boy (2001) producer
• Smoke Signals (1998) director, co-producer
• Bringing It All Back Home (1996) director
• Tenacity (1994) director

Image credit: Chris Eyre - courtesy of Gwendolen Cates and Native Peoples Magazine; Chris Eyre - courtesy of the filmmaker