Victoria Lean

Showrunner / Producer / Director / Writer Victoria Lean is an award-winning filmmaker whose keen artistic sensibility and forward-thinking approach earned her the 2017 Vanguard Award from the Documentary Organization of Canada.

Working at the intersection of comedy and documentary, she series produced, wrote, and directed We're All Gonna Die (Even Jay Baruchel) a six-episode series about existential threats facing humanity. The smart, playful investigation of how the world could end premiered at Hot Docs 2022 and is streaming on CRAVE in Canada and SBS in Australia. The series won four 2023 Canadian Screen Awards (CSA), including Best Directing, Best Editing, and Best Series, Factual and the Barbara Sears Award for Editorial Research.

She followed up with The Climate Baby Dilemma for CBC Originals, which premiered in Canada in November 2022. It won Best Documentary (POV) at Yorkton Film Festival. With the conversation about parenthood and climate change heating up, the film follows journalists, experts, and activists unpacking what to expect when you’re expecting... climate change. She’s also the Executive Producer of the dramedy feature film, I Like Movies, which opened to sold out crowds at TIFF 2022, continues its award-winning festival run and theatrical release across Canada with Mongrel in March 2023.

Victoria started raising financing for Chandler Levack’s debut feature in 2019, and the Telefilm Talent to Watch film is now garnered critical acclaim in US and Canada (Indiewire, Globe and Mail). Victoria also received a Best Comedy Series CSA nomination as the Producer of Nirvanna the Band the Show which the National Post called "the best Canadian TV show in the last two decades." The mockumentary series for VICE premiered at TIFF 2016 and was broadcast in Canada, the US, the UK, and Australia (Season 1 and Season 2 trailers). Rolling Stone included it in its list of “Most Anticipated TV Shows of 2017.”

In April 2023, she received Netflix development funding through the Hot Docs mid-career incubator to produce her next feature. Her company’s first feature documentary, After the Last River (2015), screened theatrically and won five festival awards, including Best Canadian Feature at Planet in Focus, where it also opened the festival. It was featured on the cover of the 100th Issue of POV magazine, aired on the CBC's documentary channel, and was nominated for a Canadian Screen Award (CSA) for the Donald Brittain Award for Best Social/Political Documentary. Seven years since its release, it continues to air on cable, be taught in universities, and used by Indigenous communities fighting resource extraction on their land. Her short digital documentaries include Welcome to Poole’s Land, which garnered 10M+ views across VICE Platforms. For CBC Gem, her episode of Farm Crime, received a “most disturbing” shout-out in NOW magazine’s list of “25 most binge-worthy TV shows of 2018.”

She holds an MFA in Film Production and MBA in Arts and Media from York University, and a Jt. Hon BA from McGill.