Susanna Salonen is a Finnish-German film director, screenwriter and cinematographer. Born in 1966 in Finland, Salonen grew up in
Lübeck
Lübeck (; Low German also ), officially the Hanseatic City of Lübeck (german: Hansestadt Lübeck), is a city in Northern Germany. With around 217,000 inhabitants, Lübeck is the second-largest city on the German Baltic coast and in the stat ...
and trained as a camerawoman in Berlin. She has shot several award-winning documentaries, and written and directed fiction films. Her fiction debut ''
Patong Girl
''Patong Girl'' is a 2014 German-Thai film written and directed by Susanna Salonen. The film premiered on the Festival of German film in Ludwigshafen. It was theatrically released in Germany on 25 December 2014 and in Thailand 21 April 2016. The ...
'' won the prestigious German
Grimme award
The Grimme-Preis ("Grimme Award"; prior to 2011: Adolf-Grimme-Preis) is one of the most prestigious German television awards. It is named after the first general director of Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk, Adolf Grimme.German film academy.
In 2020, she filmed in the central Arctic during the
MOSAiC Expedition
The Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC, ) expedition was a one-year-long expedition into the Central Arctic (September 2019 - October 2020). For the first time a modern research icebreaker was able to ope ...
on German research-icebreaker
Polarstern
RV ''Polarstern'' (meaning pole star) is a German research icebreaker of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) in Bremerhaven, Germany. ''Polarstern'' was built by Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft in Kiel and Nobiskrug in R ...
for the international documentary ''Arctic Drift'' on climate change research in the Arctic.