Therese A. Engels is a passionate filmmaker with a strong focus on environmental issues and 17 years of experience in the television industry. She grew up in the countryside near the Austrian town of Salzburg where she was raised together with her sister and brother by parents who taught her an understanding and love for science, wildlife and nature. Therese studied social work and social pedagogics in Linz, Austria, and Berlin, Germany. After she graduated Therese continued her studies in New York with a focus on American film and literature and began her career as a professional documentary filmmaker.

Although she was always strongly interested in big cities she never lost her passion for nature and developed a big interest in environments in which humans and wildlife share the same habitat. Her long term experience in working with natural and modified ecosystems brought the filmmaker to places like the pristine waters of the Sulu Sea where she filmed the gold pearl bearing oysters, to the border of Thailand and Burma where she visited an extraordinary kickboxing monk who raises orphaned children in his temple, and shared the hardships of daily life of a snake catcher and his daughter in the flood lands of Tonle Sap Lake, Cambodia.

It is her understanding as a filmmaker it is a big privilege to meet people like the snake catcher Van Voth and his family, to be invited to the privacy of a family´s home, to share their happy moments and hardships, their dreams and losses. Therese has a passion for digging up stories and going into detail, as well a strong focus and talent for catching moments and atmospheres and keeping them as natural as possible. Right now she has a focus on topics related to various aspects of sustainability. Apart from filmmaking she enjoys every possible moment with her family amazed by her little daughter´s implicitness to enjoy the challenges of life.