Born in Brooklyn, Catherine Cyran graduated from Harvard and moved to London to work as a management consultant for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Upon returning to the States, she acted as an issues advisor and campaign consultant for several state and congressional political campaigns in Massachusetts. Following a stint at Stanford Business School, she changed course and moved to Los Angeles to begin a career in filmmaking.
She began by writing and producing low-budget movies for Roger Corman. Next, she wrote and directed her first feature, “White Wolves,” an outdoor family adventure for The Disney Channel, which won her a Daytime Emmy nomination. She went on to write and/or direct more than twenty other films, including “Dangerous Waters,” a river-rafting movie for The Family Channel; “Sawbones,” a horror movie for Showtime; “True Heart,” an action-drama starring Kirsten Dunst; and “Christmas Do-Over,” a romantic comedy starring Jay Mohr. More recently, she wrote “Honey 3: Dare to Dance,” a hip-hop dance movie, and co-wrote “Werewolf: The Beast Among Us,” both for Universal. She also directed three installments of the “Prince & Me” romantic comedy film franchise starring Chris Geere, shooting the films in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and Thailand. In between films, she wrote a young adult novel, Island of the Last Great Auk, adapted from her screenplay, “The Last Story,” which won the 2014 Canadian International Film Festival award for excellence in writing.
In 2019, Catherine became a permanent resident of Canada, satisfying all Canadian content requirements. Since that time, she has directed three movies in quick succession: “The Victoria Gotti Story,” a bio-pic for Lifetime; “A Christmas Duet,” a rom-com for Hallmark Channel; and “A Homecoming For the Holidays,” a drama for Hallmark Movies and Mysteries.
Catherine continues to split her time between writing and directing and plans on residing in Vancouver in the future.
