Strange but true: at age 16, I knew I wanted to be a documentary film editor. As a college student three years later, I convinced a director to let me edit his film Boys in Winter about the beloved Brooklyn Dodger PeeWee Reese. I’ve been honing the craft of transforming 100 (or 400) hours of footage into moving and relevant stories since then. 

 

In 2005, Dyanna Taylor, the extraordinary DP and director, invited me to edit the documentary series The Monastery for The Learning Channel. Two years later, I began work on Motherland with Jennifer Steinman, and MINE: Taken by Katrina with Geralyn Pezanoski. Those two films premiered at SXSW in 2009 and both won audience awards in their categories. I returned to SXSW in 2011 with Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine’s Something Ventured.

 

With James Redford, I edited four films including The Big Picture: Rethinking Dyslexia and Toxic Hot Seat, both of which aired on HBO. Paper Tigers and Resilience have become watershed documentaries about the long-lasting effects of childhood stress. Together they have had more than 40,000 community screenings nationwide and counting.

 

Recent projects include Norah Shapiro's Time for Ilhan (Tribeca), Chelsea Christer's Bleeding Audio (Slamdance), Theo Rigby's Waking Dream (PBS web series), Jennifer Maytorena Taylor's For the Love of Rutland (Hotdocs/PBS), Erika Cohn's What You'll Remember (NY Times Op-Doc), and Jennifer Siebel Newsom's FAIR PLAY (Hello Sunshine/Hulu). 

​​

Years of editing and story consulting inspired me to direct my first feature doc with my husband, Todd Boekelheide, the prolific documentary composer. MAKE A CIRCLE -- a love letter to early educators and a rallying cry for a child care system in crisis -- premiered in 2024 and will be on PBS in Fall 2025. 

​

I have taught editing master classes at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and UC Santa Cruz’s Social Documentation program and have given presentations about the neuroscience of impact storytelling -- basically my favorite subject matter. Todd and I live in Berkeley with our two amazing kiddos.