ABOUT
I start every film the same way: by watching the footage. The outline, the logline, the pitch deck...those may give a vision of what the film is "supposed" to be...but the real film lives in the footage, and my job is to find it. Editing a film begins with endless possibility, and I love the slow narrowing toward the truth of what it wants to be. It's exciting and terrifying in equal measure.
I'm drawn to stories about people in the grip of something - a passion, a mission, an injustice they can't walk away from. The young scientists in Inventing Tomorrow trying to solve problems that adults have given up on. Ruth Westheimer, who survived the Holocaust and turned her grief into a life's work. The NASA scientists in Good Night Oppy who spent fifteen years tending to a machine on another planet. And in films like The Keepers and Assassins, women who found themselves in the crosshairs of forces much larger than themselves, and fought back anyway. What connects all of it, for me, is the search for the emotional center. Where is the heart of this story? What does the footage want to become?
My most recently released project, Social Studies (Hulu, 2024), is a five-episode docuseries directed by Lauren Greenfield. It follows a group of Los Angeles teenagers whose identities have been built almost entirely online. I'm currently editing a new feature with Ryan White, following our work together on Good Night Oppy (Amazon, 2022), which won the News & Documentary Emmy for Outstanding Writing, multiple Critics Choice Documentary Awards including Best Documentary Feature, and was nominated by the American Cinema Editors for Best Editing.
Other projects I'm proud of: Couples Therapy (Showtime, 2020–2023), which earned an ACE Eddie Award for Best Edited Documentary Series in 2024; the Emmy-nominated The Keepers (Netflix, 2017); Assassins (Sundance, 2020); Ask Dr. Ruth (Sundance, 2019); and Watch the Sound with Mark Ronson (Apple TV+, 2021), among others. I also served as Consulting Editor on P.S. Burn This Letter Please (Tribeca, 2020) and Visible: Out on Television (Apple, 2020), and most recently on Jonnie, an upcoming documentary about women's bull-riding champion Jonnie Jonckowski.
Documentary editing is still an under-recognized craft, even as the form itself has never been more visible. I care about changing that, which is part of why I helped found the Alliance of Documentary Editors and have stayed involved in the community through the Sundance Edit and Story Lab, panels, and lecturing at UCLA and Pitzer College. My thoughts on editing have appeared in Filmmaker Magazine, Cinema Editors Magazine, and on the Team Deakins podcast.
When I'm not in the edit, you can usually find me with my family on the forest trails outside Durham, NC...where thankfully nobody asks me to find the emotional center of anything. If you're interested in working together, I'd love to hear from you.