The National Film Board of Canada has named Suzanne Guèvremont as its new chair and government film commissioner.

She replaces Claude Joli-Coeur, who led Canada’s publicly funded filmmaker for nearly nine years and officially left his post on Friday.  

NFB productions and co-productions have earned 78 Oscar nominations and won the big prize 12 times, including for the short animation film The Danish Poet by director Torill Kove in 2006 and the animated short Ryan by Chris Landreth in 2004.

The NFB received a 1988 honorary Academy Award for overall excellence in cinema. Early Oscars picked up by pioneering NFB directors include Stuart Legg earning the best documentary short for Churchill’s Island in 1941 and Norman McLaren winning for Neighbors, also in the best documentary short category, in 1952.

Guèvremont starts her five-year term at the NFB on Nov. 28. As a veteran producer of 3D animation, video games and visual effects in Quebec, Guèvremont was executive director of Synthese – Pôle Image Quebec and most recently NAD-UQAC, the digital arts and animation college, a post she had held since 1999.

“The Canadian landscape is changing, the means at our disposal for creating content are constantly evolving, and so are audience behaviors. I’m very much looking forward to meeting all the teams across Canada, and to working with them in pursuit of our goals,” she said in a statement on Friday.