PAULA TIBERIUS
writer | filmmaker | musician
BIOGRAPHY
I'm a screenwriter, filmmaker and musician creating art in the hopes of making the world a better place. One of my most important career achievements is saving a teenage girl stuck in the suburbs with no friends, completely depressed. She wrote to tell me that she watched my movie Goldirocks and was inspired to stop harming herself and start a band instead.
Raised by two artist scholars, I was taught from a young age to question authority, value craft and live with purpose. I fell in love with punk rock and the Detroit rock sound in high school, an aesthetic that grounds my 'be who you are' philosophy. I learned to make films at the University of Toronto's Hart House Film Board and the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT) where I edited my first three short films (Busk, Killing Time & Oxanna) on an Intercine flatbed machine the old school way - cutting film strips and taping them back together. For all its efficiency, digital film editing's got nothing on celluloid. When a single edit takes two full minutes to execute, you learn to think long and hard about how each cut changes the story.
Recent produced screenplays I’ve written have been featured on Netflix, Amazon, Peacock, CBC, UPtv, INSP and more. My camp thriller for Lifetime Television, Hunting Housewives, starring Denise Richards, airs Spring 2024 and production just wrapped on my script for the third installment of Hallmark’s The Jane Mysteries, starring Jodie Sweetin. I co-directed the TV romance Christmas Time Capsule for UPtv’s 2023 holiday season, and my screenplay Snowbound for Christmas was the #4 Netflix movie in December 2021. I was a lead writer on the one-hour drama The Wedding Planners and my award-winning feature film Goldirocks (2004) was released theatrically in Canada. You can check out a selection from my development slate on my Film & TV page.
I write and record music with my husband Richard Duguay at our home studio, Into The Black, in Los Angeles, and recently directed a multi-part music video campaign for his album Beautiful Decline. My children's album Be Who You Are (2015) is a 14-track collection of music and spoken word that encourages young people to make art and question everything - coming up on its 10th anniversary!