top of page
jen 2023 sm.jpg

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). 

​

I have taught editing master classes at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and UC Santa Cruz’s Social Documentation program. I’m lucky enough to call the prolific composer Todd Boekelheide my husband. Our combined decades of experience as storytellers in the trenches of post production have inspired us to direct our first feature doc.

 

We live in Berkeley with our two amazing kiddos.

jenbradwell_pix.jpg
bottom of page