Katie Bender (filmmaker)

Bender is a former gymnast and freestyle skier, and trained on the Australian freestyle aerial ski team. Bender attended Methodist Ladies College in Victoria, Melbourne where she could study and train at a high-performance gymnastics center based on campus. At 16 years old, Bender was recruited by the Olympic Winter Institute of Australia to join an athlete talent pathway program which converted gymnasts into freestyle aerial skiers.^[1]

Bender's directorial debut was the 2016 feature documentary, The Will To Fly, about Australian Olympic freestyle skier gold medalist Lydia Lassila. Bender is an ex-teammate of Lydia and was inspired to make The Will To Fly in 2012 while visiting Lydia at a training camp in Utah. Lydia was the defending Olympic champion at the time and had just returned to the sport as a first-time mother. Bender realised the potential for a feature-length film when Lydia explained her sporting aspirations to narrow the gap between male and female capabilities by performing a "quad triple twisting, triple somersault" at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.^[2][3][4]

The Will to Fly took five years to make and was one of Australia's first feature-length sports documentaries. The film made its Australian premiere in Melbourne on International Women's Day (8 March) 2016 followed by a theatrical release, where it was positively received by critics.^[5][6] The film was described as "The Most Inspirational Movie of the Year" by The Huffington Post Australia.^[7]

Bender was the director of the 2023 Disney+ docu-series Matildas: The World at Our Feet, for which she was nominated for the AACTA Award for Best Direction in Nonfiction Television.^[8][9][10]

The six-part docu-series follows the Australia women's national soccer team, as they prepare for the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup on home soil.^[11][12]

• The Will To Fly (2016) – director
• We Champion (2021) – director
• Matildas: The World at Our Feet (2023) – director
• Taurasi (2025) – director