About Lara
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF LARA DAMIANI
Lara has many strings to her bow. That’s not to suggest that each string is pulled tight and neatly tied off, or even that her bow is perfectly crafted from some fine Elvish timber, but there is a bow and there are many strings. Let’s go back a way…
At 23, Lara was the youngest female Executive Officer in any Australian fishing industry organisation. Quite a feat given the macho nature of the industry. This may be where Lara honed a number of skills, dealing with State and Federal Ministers, Premiers and good ol’ fashion seafood industry tycoons. She helped establish the first industry run education centre which later became the Australian Fisheries Academy. A leading fishing industry representative once said of Lara “With her commitment, enthusiasm, leading by example, vision for the future and her ‘never give up’ attitude, Ms Damiani has achieved the impossible. Everyone in the industry looks up to her.”
Lara likes to keep busy and do many things. She has over eighteen years experience in communications, writing and editing, event management, project start-up and management, research, production, public relations and marketing gained working in private industry, in State and Federal Government and as a freelancer.
In 1997 and all fished out, Lara looked at where she was and where she wanted to be and found some disparity between the two. A trip to France to write the novel she knew she had in her proved productive and liberating. Returning from Europe with not one but two unpublished manuscripts under her arm, Lara was determined to forge her own path in event-management and public relations before she settled on becoming a copywriter.
But for Lara, one career wasn’t enough and her thirst for fulfillment and money to launch other projects was supplemented with various roles in Government and later, non for profit organisations.
By this stage, it was apparent to Lara that true passion can only have thin, inadequate blankets thrown over it for so long. In 2007, having sold nearly everything she owned, Lara set off for Tibet, literally risking her life to make a documentary about the plight of the Tibetan people who live under a violent and oppressive Chinese regime.
As a first time director/producer/camera operator, film distributor and do-er of all things, her documentary, Tibet’s Cry for Freedom, was acquired by two international television broadcasters, has screened at 14 film festivals across the world and was picked up for distribution by a leading Australian/NZ educational DVD distributor. Watch Australian television stories “Today Tonight” and “Sunday Program” about Lara and the making of her Tibet documentary. In her spare time, she founded The Tibet Project - a non-profit initiative to raise awareness of Tibet and it’s importance as a metaphor for important universal principles.
These days, telling compelling stories through film is what Lara prefers to do. She established THINK FILMS to produce documentaries on issues that she’s passionate about - human rights, social justice, oppression, indigenous issues and culture.