ABOUT
Helen Kearns is an Emmy Award-winning documentary film editor and writer known for her intuitive sense of empathy and tension, and her ability to distill complex subjects into deeply human narratives. Helen has collaborated with many of today’s leading nonfiction filmmakers to craft films and series that are both cinematic and true to life.
Helen’s most recently released project, Social Studies (Hulu, 2024), is a five-episode docuseries directed by Lauren Greenfield that follows a group of Los Angeles teenagers over the course of a school year. Blending vérité footage with screen recordings and social-media ephemera, the series offers a portrait of adolescence in the algorithmic age—where identity, belonging, and self-expression unfold as both performance and truth. The series premiered at the Telluride Film Festival.
Helen is currently editing a new feature documentary with director Ryan White, following their award-winning collaboration on Good Night Oppy (Amazon, 2022). The film tells NASA’s Mars Rover mission through a human lens - a journey of friendship, endurance, and discovery. Good Night Oppy won the News & Documentary Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing (shared by Helen and director Ryan White), as well as multiple Critics Choice Documentary Awards, including Best Documentary Feature, Best Narration, and Best Science / Nature Documentary. It was also nominated by the American Cinema Editors Eddie Awards and Critics Choice Awards for Best Editing.
Her previous feature work includes Assassins (2020, Sundance Premiere), a political thriller that unravels the shocking conspiracy around the assassination of Kim Jong-nam; Ask Dr. Ruth (2019, Sundance Premiere), a portrait of the legendary sex therapist; Inventing Tomorrow (2018, Sundance Premiere), a look at young scientists confronting global environmental challenges; The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble (2015, TIFF Premiere); and Good Ol’ Freda (2013, SXSW Premiere).
For television, Helen was an editor on Season 3B of Showtime’s ongoing series Couples Therapy (2020–2023), known for its quiet, observational approach to real therapy sessions. She also edited Couples Therapy: The COVID Special (2020), a one-hour special capturing the challenges faced by couples during the early months of the pandemic. Her work on the series earned an ACE Eddie Award for Best Edited Documentary Series in 2024. She also edited the Emmy-nominated Netflix series The Keepers (2017), a true-crime investigation into the unsolved murder of a Catholic school teacher, and Apple TV+’s Watch the Sound with Mark Ronson (2021), a music-driven exploration of sound innovation and the creative process.
Helen also served as Consulting Editor on the Tribeca-premiering feature P.S. Burn This Letter Please (2020), which unearthed a cache of 1950s drag letters and reframed the hidden history of queer resistance, as well as Apple’s landmark docuseries Visible: Out on Television (2020). She recently served as a story consultant for Jonnie, the upcoming documentary chronicling the life of women's bull-riding champion Jonnie Jonckowski.
Beyond her film and television work, Helen is deeply engaged in the documentary community and in mentoring the next generation of editors. She served as a Contributing Editor at the 2014 Sundance Edit and Story Lab and has since shared her experience as a guest lecturer at UCLA and Pitzer College, as well as a contributor on various panels (IDA). Her insights on craft and storytelling have been featured in Filmmaker Magazine, Cinema Editors Magazine, and on the Team Deakins podcast. A founding member of the Alliance of Documentary Editors (ADE), Helen has been a leading advocate for the recognition of editors in nonfiction film, serving on ADE’s Steering Committee from 2018–2020. When she's not deep in the edit, Helen can be found cruising the forest trails outside her hometown of Durham, NC, with her family, or writing about herself in the third person. Please get in touch if you're interested in working with her!