Kate McCullough

Following her studies at the Lodz Film School, Poland, Kate teamed up with Michael Lavelle on Ken Wardrop’s “His & Hers,” where they jointly won the Cinematography Award in World Cinema Documentary at Sundance 2010. This success launched McCullough on a run of documentaries, including “Here Was Cuba” (2013), “The Farthest” (2017), for which she was nominated for an Emmy in Lighting Design, and Thin Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott’s “Songs for While I’m Away” (2020), which picked up an “Award for Excellence” at the 2022 Guild of Television Camera Professionals. She also lensed “I, Dolours” (2018), a docudrama by Maurice Sweeney, for which she was awarded the coveted Golden Frog for her cinematography at Camerimage in 2018.

She then began shooting drama where she worked on the second block for the Element produced “Normal People” (2020) with director Hettie Macdonald and won the Irish Film & Television Awards for Best Cinematography in 2021. McCullough shot the acclaimed Irish language film “An Cailín Ciúin” (“The Quiet Girl”) (2022). Her exacting work on this feature has garnered her Best Cinematography at the 2022 Irish Film & Television Awards and more recently earning her an Excellence Award in Cinematography at the European Film Awards 2022. In January 2023, The American Society of Cinematography nominated Kate in their Spotlight Award for her work on this film. And The Quiet Girl was the first ever Irish Language film to be nominated for An Academy Award in ‘Best International Feature Film’.

McCullough is a member of the Irish Society of Cinematographers and Illuminatrix.