Owain Astles is a film director, producer and participatory arts practitioner. Born and bred in rural southwest UK with Welsh heritage, Owain now lives in New York and works between New York, Bristol, and London. Owain’s work focuses on community co-creation and social impact, through stories of intimate personal relationships.

He is a member of BAFTA Connect and a Gotham Marcie Bloom Fellow. Owain studies on the Grad Film programme at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in New York, where he is a recipient of the BAFTA scholarship and the WTC Johnson scholarship. Owain’s work has screened at multiple BAFTA and BIFA-qualifying festivals.

Owain worked as a Participatory Director with Inside Job Productions, co-creating films with men in London prisons. He participated in BFI NETWORK’s Shorts2Features scheme, developing his first feature, and in 2025, he took part in HBO’s shadow programme on House Of The Dragon.

As a 1st AD, Owain has worked with the likes of BFI Network, BBC Films, Converse and Netflix. Achievements include winning Best Short Film at the BFI London Film Festival 2022 and Best British Short at the British Short Film Awards 2022. A participatory doc feature he 1st ADed, The Stimming Pool, was named in The Guardian’s Best Films of 2025.

Owain has delivered Homeless Action Week,  an event involving people in Bristol’s homeless community and Cardboard Camp, a theatre partnership between Cardboard Citizens and Bristol Old Vic, working with people experiencing homelessness. Most recently, he produced Inspire Festival for the National Criminal Justice Arts Alliance at Rich Mix cinema in East London. In 2018, he gave a TEDx talk about homelessness.