Eyre, Chris

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

In 1998, Chris Eyre worked on two film projects. His first release was Things We Do (1998). 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, a tribal cop and a Vietnam vet battling alcohol and emotional problems. He said at a screening: “The only thing you get in making period pieces about Indians is guilt. I’m interested in doing what non-Indian filmmakers can’t do, which is portray contemporary Indians.”

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.

Episodes:
Chris Eyre, Mel Brooks, Architects of Air
Chris Eyre, JoAnn Verburg, Gary Myers
Chris Eyre, Jerry Wellman & Matthew Chase-Daniel, National Dance Institute of New Mexico

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