Sabrina Zanella-Foresi is a filmmaker living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who works in a wide range of styles (documentary, narrative, experimental, broadcast television and museum installation). She works primarily as an editor on feature length documentaries and is fluent in Avid Media Composer, Adobe Premiere, and Final Cut 7. She has worked in 16mm film, and all video formats.
She is a strong story editor and enjoys the intense problem solving of finding out what the film is really "about" and enjoys this process as much as she loves working with sound and picture to render that story. She's also had the privilege of working on several first-person or personal documentaries to help the filmmaker perfect their voice in telling what can be very difficult stories.
As an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst she studied Social Thought and Political Economy double-majored with Philosophy and graduated phi beta kappa, summa cum laude (1992). She made a film as her undergraduate thesis in exchange with Hampshire College, working in 16mm film and went on to receive her MFA in film from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (1995). She made numerous short films of her own and had an extensive exhibition record. Editing was always her favorite part of the filmmaking process. But it was through watching—and teaching that she really learned how to edit. Sabrina was a teaching fellow at Harvard University in the department of Visual and Environmental Studies assisting courses in film history and theory, where all of the films were shown on 35mm, a rare and amazing opportunity to spend at least 8 hours a week in the dark seeing the greatest films ever made at the Harvard Film Archive. It was through teaching shot analysis in these courses (she received the Derek Bok teaching award at Harvard University for her work in film history) as well as in her own courses taught at Boston University, Emerson College, the University of Massachusetts-Boston, and Massachusetts College of Art that she really got to understand the art of "the cut."
She left teaching to be a fellow at the Film Study Center at Harvard University (2000) and immediately became a full-time film editor starting with Laurel Chiten's Touched (2002) and never looked back, having cut about 15 feature-length documentaries, as well as countless short films in many genres. She has acted as a producer on many of the films she has cut, particularly for more inexperiences directors. And in 2016,she started cutting television series for PBS (Simply Ming and Weekends with Yankee). She also is a consulting editor for for feature length documentaries.
In residence, Zanella-Foresi completed a fine cut of the film, Twisted, as the film's editor in collaboration with director Laurel Chiten. Twisted aired on PBS in 2006. She was then in pre-production of a documentary about domestic violence in Japan.
