Tonia Mishiali is a screenwriter, director and producer born in Famagusta Cyprus. While studying Hotel & Catering Management in the United Kingdom she realized that her true passion was filmmaking. She therefore proceeded to achieve a BA(Hons) in Media Production. After her graduation she moved back to Cyprus to start working as a director and producer, at the same time creating her own production company Zipcode production&design. Mishiali has directed and produced for theatre, film and television in Cyprus and abroad, dealing with a variety of subjects, but focusing mostly on social and women’s issues. In 2013 she made her first short film Dead End traveled to numerous film festivals and won several awards. Her second awarded short, Lullaby of the butterfly (2014), also competed in many international film festivals. Her feature directorial debut Pause (2018) is a Cyprus/Greece co-production, represented by Film Republic (UK). Pause was selected in the EFP’s “Europe! voices of women in film” section at the Sydney Film Festival 2019, where ten films by Europe’s most outstanding women directors were presented. Mishiali is now developing her second and third feature films Nala and Stella and Maya, the latter of which (in an earlier version and under the working title Moonstruck) won a special mention at the Scriptwriters Guild of Greece 2018 awards and was developed through Sources2 scriptwriting workshop with funding from the Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture.