Chris Eyre

Chris Eyre (born 1968), an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, is a film director and producer who as of 2012 is chairman of the film department at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design.

Films

Eyre's films focus on contemporary Native American life, with a rejection of conventional stereotypes.

In 1998, Chris Eyre worked on two film projects. His first release is Things We Do (1998) and following that was his critically acclaimed and touted debut film below. His debut film, Smoke Signals (1998), won the Sundance Film Festival Filmmakers Trophy and the Audience Award. It also won "Best Film" honors at the 1998 American Indian Film Festival.

Eyre's second film, Skins, is the story of two brothers on the Pine Ridge Reservation—one is a tribal cop and the other is a Vietnam vet battling alcohol and emotional problems. Eyre has also directed two episodes of the famed PBS series Mystery!; A Thief of Time and Skinwalkers starring Adam Beach as Jim Chee, and Wes Studi as Joe Leaphorn. Both were executive produced by Robert Redford and based on the best selling Tony Hillerman novels. Skinwalkers is a mystery involving skinwalkers or shape-shifters, and the murders of several medicine men. A Thief of Time is a who-dunnit that intertwines very competitive anthropologists, possible artifact thievery, a missing professor, and the legend of the Anasazi.