Ciarán Donnelly (director)
Irish film and television director

Ciarán Donnelly is an Irish film and television director. He is primarily known for his direction of major international series such as Camelot, The Tudors, Titanic: Blood and Steel and Vikings.
His work includes four episodes of the ITV comedy drama series Cold Feet (including the episode that won the series the Best Drama Series BAFTA), the crime drama series Donovan, the BBC One drama Spooks and the 2016 Discovery Channel historical miniseries Harley and the Davidsons. His 2006 serial Stardust won the IFTA for Best Single Drama/Drama Serial. He was a co-creator (with Peter McKenna) of the Irish television series Kin.
Since 2006, he has been a lead director on the Irish/Canadian series The Tudors, for which he won another IFTA in 2009. In 2010, he was nominated for another IFTA for his work on the third season. He garnered yet another IFTA nomination in 2013 for Titanic: Blood and Steel. In february 2022 it was announced that Donnelly was nominated once more for an IFTA for his work on The Wheel of Time.
Filmography
Also second unit director in Peaches (2000).
The public source identifies “Ciarán Donnelly (director)” as irish film and television director. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Ciarán, Donnelly and director.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ciarán Donnelly (director)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.