Anna Patarakina BSC FSF is a Russian-born, London-based Director of Photography working across film, television, and music videos.
Most recently, she completed work on Shy and Lola, a BBC drama directed by Sam Donovan and produced by Clerkenwell Films. She was also delighted to be invited to join the BSC in 2026 as well as the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences.
In 2025, Anna was in Budapest shooting Ponies, a new Peacock series starring Emilia Clarke and Haley Lu Richardson. The show was directed by Susanna Fogel and Viet Nguyen and produced by NBCUniversal Television. It is now streaming on Peacock and Sky.
Her latest feature, Dreamers, premiered in the Panorama section of the 75th Berlin International Film Festival. Directed by Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor in her feature directorial debut, the film was nominated for both the Panorama Audience Award and the Teddy Award for Best Feature Film. Dreamers went on to win Best Feature at the GAZE International LGBTQIA Film Festival, screened at the 2025 BFI London Film Festival, and is currently showing in cinemas across the UK.
In 2024, Anna shot three episodes of Down Cemetery Road, an Apple TV+ thriller starring Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson, directed by Sam Donovan.
The year before, she was the lead DP on the Paramount+ psychological thriller Insomnia (six episodes), produced by Left Bank and directed by Börkur Sigthorsson.
Other recent projects include Boat Story for BBC One, where she reunited with director Alice Troughton after their work together on The Lesson — a psychological thriller starring Daryl McCormack, Richard E. Grant, and Julie Delpy, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2022.
Also in 2022, Anna shot episodes 6 and 7 of the Sky Original The Midwich Cuckoos, directed by Börkur Sigthorsson and based on John Wyndham’s novel The Village of the Damned.
Her earlier TV credits include Get Even (episodes 1–2, dir. Sarah Walker) and The One (episodes 4–6, dir. Jeremy Lovering) for Netflix.
Anna began her career in Sweden after graduating from VGIK (the All-Russian State University of Cinematography) in Moscow, where she studied from 2007 to 2012. She spent six years working in the Scandinavian independent film scene and became a member of the FSF (Swedish Society of Cinematographers).
Her debut feature, How to Stop a Wedding (dir. Drazen Kuljanin), was shot in six hours on a train from Malmö to Stockholm and won Best Debut at the Warsaw International Film Festival. She later worked with Drazen again on Balkan Noir (2017).
Other feature work includes Zoo (dir. Antonio Tublén), which premiered at Sitges, and Breaking Surface (dir. Joachim Heden), a survival thriller partially filmed in Europe’s largest underwater set.
Anna also has an ongoing collaboration with Clean Bandit, which began with their early video Mozart’s House and continued through ten music videos, including the Grammy-winning Rather Be, as well as Rockabye, Symphony, and several tour documentaries. Notably, the videos for Rockabye and Symphony were nominated for British Video of the Year at the BRIT Awards in 2017 and 2018.
She currently lives in London and is represented by Worldwide Production Agency (WPA).