Beryl Richards
Lecturer TV Drama
Beryl directs film, TV drama and comedy. In TV, as lead director, she’s helped create many popular UK teens and kids series, for which she has been awarded 5 BAFTA’s, and 4 International EMMY nominations, most recently in 2020 for drama for Joe All Alone which also won a kids drama BAFTA in 2018. In 2019 she directed Free Rein YA series for Netflix. Beryl’s current feature documentary, Hello Stranger, a story of about adoption and family, is largely created from 25 years of her own home movies. Beryl’s short cinema films have been shown in 60 international festivals. Her feature script Runaway won the VFF screenwriting prize at the Berlinale. Her play Diamond, commissioned by BBC Arts, ran at the 2018 Edinburgh fringe. Beryl has exec produced nearly 200 kids short films for the European Broadcasting Union working with writers and directors in 38 countries, many films appear in international film festivals; two have won a BAFTA for the BBC and S4C.
Beryl chaired the board of Directors UK from 2015-17. She helped found and also chaired the DUK’s Gender Equality Group, which has led campaigning for better representation of women directors in the UK and worldwide. She won the 2016 Women in Film/ITV Achievement of the Year award for this work. She has been an elected member of BAFTA's TV committee since 2017, taking a particular interest in diversity. She is a BAFTA mentor and also mentors film/screenwriting students with autism and ADHD. In 2019 she joined the Screen Cornwall advisory committee.
Beryl joined Falmouth teaching TV Drama part time in 2019, becoming full time in Sept 2020.
