Liz Mermin specialises in directing feature documentaries, though she has also directed many, many hours of broadcast and SVOD series and shorts. She specialises in creative character-driven films which tell stories from all over the world – from the inner lives of Irish racehorses, to strange encounters between Afghan and American hairdressers in Kabul, to Eurovision-inspired violence against journalists in Baku. Her films have been broadcast internationally and played major film festivals. Five were made for the acclaimed BBC Storyville series, and four were released in cinemas in the US or UK. They have been praised for their light touch, sensitivity, balance, and often unexpected sense of humour.

She recently directed a critically acclaimed two-hour documentary feature to mark the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, produced by Arrow Pictures for PBS, Channel 4, and Arte. Generation 9/11 ( Children of 9/11 on C4, Les Enfants du 11 Septembre on Arté) looks at the experience of young people growing up in the wake of this world-changing event through the eyes of seven young people who lost their fathers in the attacks before they had a chance to meet. The Daily Mail gave it five stars, calling the film “both unspeakably tragic and oddly unsentimental.”

Her work on series includes an episode of the award-winning 2021 BBC series Blair & Brown: The New Labour Revolution, featuring a star-studded cast of UK politicians and civil servants (The Guardian called the series “a stirring, illuminating watch: an example of how modern political documentary can become a sociohistorical account of the times”; The Telegraph called it “Brilliant”), available on BBC iPlayer. She directed and wrote two episodes of the CNN Originals series First Ladies, including an extended episode on Michelle Obama which premiered 4 October 2020 to a US broadcast audience of 2.2 million and is now available on HBO Max and NOW TV. She was also a director on a 12-part Netflix series about the first year of life.

As a director/producer/editor in New York Liz made many hours of television, ranging from current affairs to ob-docs, for PBS, ABC, Discovery, and a variety of other cable channels. Her work at this time included a series about the lives of teenage girls across the US, a 2002 ABC special about first responders at the World Trade Center in September 2001, and advocacy pieces on gun control and human rights defenders. Her first documentary, co-directed/shot/edited with Jenny Raskin, was financed by grants, including a MacArthur grant, released in cinemas by Cowboy Pictures, and picked up by the Sundance Channel.

In 2014 Liz was brought in to the Thomson Reuters Foundation to introduce documentary to their editorial coverage. As Director of Visual she built up and oversaw a team creating short docs and interactive features on global humanitarian topics. These were creative pieces distributed globally across the Reuters network, held to the most rigorous standards of journalism. Whilst there she directed a three-part series on climate change and child marriage in Bangladesh with Participant Media. It was a great experience and important work, but she missed directing, to which she returned in 2017.

Liz has presented her work at universities, film festivals, and workshops around the world. She has served on many juries, including the Emmys, Griersons, and Hotdocs. She also writes, most recently publishing a cover story about the Pakistani-American behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks in the Indian magazine Caravan. She has a Masters in cultural anthropology from NYU, where she studied filmmaking in the Culture and Media program. She first became interested in film as a Fulbright Scholar in Dakar, Senegal, after studying Literature at Harvard. She received a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship and was a Critical Studies Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program, where she wrote about African American independent cinema.

She is on the board of the Rahela Trust, a charity that provides scholarships to talented under-privileged Afghan girls to attend university in Afghanistan.

Liz started her directing career in New York and moved to London in the mid-2000s, where she is now (relatively) settled. She has been a dual American-British citizen since 2015.