Fiennes started her career directing music videos for artists like Al Green and Boy George, before moving into high-end TV commercials, earning several awards. Her first feature film, Onegin, starred Liv Tyler and Ralph Fiennes, was BAFTA-nominated and won her the London Critics Award for Best Newcomer. Chromophobia, her second feature film, attracted a star-studded cast (including Penelope Cruz, Damian Lewis, Kristen Scott Thomas, Harriet Walter, Ian Holm, Ben Chaplin and Rhys Ifans), and closed the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.
As an active member of the UK film industry having served on several BAFTA juries, she headed in 2015 the Tblisi Film Festival and in 2016 the Haifa Film Festival Juries. She received in 2017 a Woman of Excellence Award at the House of Lords. As early as 2011, Fiennes began pioneering the creation of a new, ‘hybrid’ film media incorporating generative ‘decision-making’ technologies in combination with studio filming and digitised environments. Her debut work, Nativity (2011) was swiftly exhibited to wide acclaim on large screens and has since been requested for international showcases from Russia to Los Angeles.
Her most recent work is a majestic, generative digital moving-image artwork titled Yugen (2018). It features Oscar-nominated actor Salma Hayek Pinault, and consists of multiple layers of highly crafted film/action sequences and backgrounds which then utilise ‘real time’ bespoke AI system to instruct a continuous moving-image experience, accompanied by an original and generative audio score. The result is a mesmeric work which neither loops or repeats. Both employ pioneering forms of generative, AI-precursor technologies to produce prodigious works which extend the possibilities of film as a medium and art as an experience. Her most recent show in which both artworks were shown together, was held in London at the Coronet Theatre in February 2025 on giant screens, to wide attendance, interest and acclaim.
