LIPPY PICTURES

Donna Malane is an award-winner screenwriter and novelist. She has written and produced extensively for television including telemovies, series drama, doco-drama, fantasy, children’s drama, sketch comedy and documentary. She has screen credits as writer, producer, script and series advisor, story-liner, script and story editor.

 

As a writer/researcher for Crimewatch for some years Donna had unprecedented access to case files and police culture. She researched and wrote the two NZ episodes of the international forensic doco-drama crime series Indelible Evidence and completed extensive research for a follow-up series. Donna was Associate Producer on Bryan Bruce's Investigator series. She co-wrote two telemovies in the Duggan series winning NZ’s ‘Best Drama Script’ for her telefeature Duggan - A Shadow of Doubt.

 

Donna produced and wrote the award winning documentary A Tale of Three Chimps for National Geographic World which screened extensively in the international market.

 

In 2007 Donna and Paula Boock formed their company Lippy Pictures. Together they created and co-produced Time Trackers, a 13 part children's time-travel drama series with co-producers Gibson Group (NZ) and Tayor Media (Aus), wrote Bloodlines a feature length drama for Screentime (NZ) (NZWG Best Script - Drama Award 2010) co-wrote and produced the feature length drama-doco Pirates of the Airwaves and four telefeature dramas; Until Proven Innocent, (shortlisted for 13 awards at the Qantas Screen Awards, winning 6 of the major awards including Best Drama), Tangiwai - A Love Story (nominated for the Festival De Television De Monte-Carlo in 2012), Field Punishment No 1 (Gold Medal at the NY International Television & Film Awards) and Jean (12 NZ TV awards, 9 world medals New York Festival of Television 2017).

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Most recently they have co-created, written and produced two seasons of the crime drama The Gulf, a NZ/German co-production which premiered in NZ and Germany in 2019 and sold to Sundance (US), Nine (Aus), UKTV, Netflix (Australasia) among others.

 

As a novelist Donna won the NZSA/Pindar Publishing Prize for her first crime novel Surrender (2010) which was republished by HarperCollins in 2012. In February 2013 her second crime novel My Brother’s Keeper was released in Australasia. Surrender is published in France under the title Une Danse de Trop and My Brother’s Keeper in Germany under the title Dunkler als der Tod.

 

Donna is now signed with New York-based publisher St Martin’s Press.