Sonja Strathearn

Sonja Strathearn is an Australian artist who lives in Iowa, USA. Her early work was predominantly collage and drawing from her student years at Brisbane College of Advanced Education 1986-1989. After teaching high school Art and English on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait, and then teaching in Brisbane, Queensland, she married her husband Lane Strathearn. During the years of raising their seven children, Sonja sometimes painted murals and sets for theatre, when they moved to Houston, Texas. It wasn't until middle age that she dared to dream she could make a film, which she sees as combining all her skills including those of being a mother of a large family and trying to achieve the impossible. Sonja Strathearn's first film 'Something Better' is a narrative story inspired by researching her family history and connecting with relatives all over the world to collaborate on a book about her English ancestors, the Blakeley family, who emigrated to Australia in the 1880s. Using many descendants of the Blakeley family to produce the film, Strathearn helped the story come to life with a small traveling crew, filming in parts of the USA and Australia. Frustrated by wanting to edit the film herself but not having the skills, Strathearn took classes at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to create her second film 'Last Chance Tango' so she could have creative control. Sonja Strathearn had been obsessed with tango a decade earlier in Houston, Texas, where she had searched for the best tango teacher, even as a tango teacher herself, learning choreography from Argentine maestro Pampa Cortes. Eventually she found who she considered to be the best, Joan Bishop, a Milongeuro style tango teacher in Texas, who Sonja later asked to be her actress for her film.