Tanya Stephan is a multi-award winning documentary director.
In 2022 she won a BAFTA , a Grierson and an RTS Award for her feature-length documentary about the transatlantic mother and baby homes scandal The Missing Children. She was also long-listed for the BAFTA Craft Award for Best Director (Factual) and nominated for the Prix Italia for Best Documentary.
Stephan has directed twelve singles and four series for the BBC, Channel 4, ITV and SVOD. Her films seek out the powerful human stories behind the headlines, creating beautifully crafted and compelling narratives, with a strong sense of purpose.
She has filmed and directed high profile documentaries about the war in Ukraine (Ukraine’s War Diaries, BBC ONE)), mental health (Sheridan Smith: Becoming Mum, ITV), chronic addiction (‘Compulsion’, BBC2), the unprecedented story of an anonymous egg donor tracking down her biological children (Donor Mum, BBC ONE), and the lives of two young girls in a Muslim faith school (‘Muslim School’, C4).
After a degree in History at Cambridge, she began her career as a radio journalist freelancing for the BBC World Service and BBC Radio Scotland. She later trained in Documentary Directing at the National Film and Television school with an award from the British Federation of Women Graduates.
Her graduation film Naz about the daughter of Zoora Shah who was serving a life sentence for poisoning her partner with arsenic, was nominated for an RTS Best Student Documentary Award. Her first film for Channel 4 for a groundbreaking series about teenagers and mental health Inside My Head, was nominated for an RTS Education Award for Best Single Documentary and shortlisted for a Grierson Award for Best Newcomer.