Biographie
Nina Kojima (née: Simonic) is a British-Slovenian film director, writer, producer, actress, TV & radio journalist / broadcaster with three decades of experience.
Nina is also an academic with three master's degrees - in philosophy, sociology, and film directing - and holds a Ph.D from the University of Glasgow.
Nina is a space enthusiast and regularly contributes articles to Space Flight magazine as well as to an academic journal JBIS, and is a member of Mars Society and a Fellow of British Interplanetary Society. She created Panopticon on Mars, an ethical concept for human habitat on Mars.
Since 2003 she lives in Marylebone, London.
Back in Slovenia Nina entered the industry as a child actor, and after a brief modelling career she started working at The National Radio Television Slovenia, first as a journalist and later as a host. By her early 20's she was already a weekly morning show host on Val 202, the most listened-to radio station in the country.
In 2000, with the help of her fellow media reporters and several well-known public figures providing official statements, Nina caused a minor national unrest when she dramatically claimed live on-air that the Slovenian government was purchasing the Russian space station Mir with taxpayers' money, for purposes ranging from border surveillance and filming the first zero-gravity adult film. Whilst most of her audience appreciated this April Fool's joke, a small minority went on to protest in front of the parliament. The police dropped all charges against her on the same day, as the Home Office Minister himself was in on the joke by officially announcing that his ministry had jointly funded the purchase with the Slovene Film Forum.
Nina was also a Slovenian host of the Eurovision Song Contest, as well as the Creator and Editor-in-Chief of the successful weekly TV show Student Street, which ran on the national television for many years. As a journalist, she interviewed many Prime Ministers and Presidents, including a live broadcast with Bill Clinton during his visit to Slovenia in 1999. From 2009 to 2018, she was the sole official correspondent in the UK and Ireland for The National Radio Television Slovenia, covering politics, current affairs, and finance, and regularly broadcasting live from No. 10 Downing Street.
After a brief pause to further her academic career, she resumed her post in April 2023, continuing until January 2024. In May 2023, Nina broadcasted the Coronation of King Charles live from Westminster Abbey. Almost at the same time, she was corresponding from the Eurovision Song Contest in Liverpool, England. She directed the feature documentary TV film "Joker Out," in which she was also the main presenter.
In 2012 Nina established a media production company in the UK, Partisan Media Limited, to produce short and feature-length documentaries, as well as feature films. Partisan Media's most recent feature-length documentary "Brexit Through the Non-political Glass" has won many awards in the international film festival circuit, including the prestigious Flickers' Rhode Island International Film Festival (an Oscar-qualifying festival), as well as the Toronto Independent Film Festival of Cift (the second largest Canadian festival hosted at the same venue of their main festival, tiff), where Nina was awarded the Best Female Film Director. It also won the Grand Prize at the Golden State Film Festival 2022 for the US premiere, where the film was screened at the iconic Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. Brexit Through the Non-political Glass is currently streaming on Amazon Prime (US & UK), as well as Tubi (20th Century Fox) and Xumo (Comcast / NBC Universal), and it has been particularly sought after on Kanopy platform, where the film has become a popular teaching material at various US, UK and European universities.
Nina's work has always been uniquely based on her journalistic insights reporting on key social agendas of today, formal training in film directing, and her acute observation as a philosopher of human nature.
Nina's latest feature documentary project "We're Going to Mars" is currently in production.
