ABOUT
KATHARINE GARRISON is a two-time Emmy-nominated and Webby Award-winning documentary editor whose long-form credits include feature documentaries such as Sons of Detroit (DOCNYC, True/False), United Skates (HBO, Tribeca Audience Award), Refuge (“a must-see film,” USA Today), Shaken (DOCNYC), The Sacrifice Zone (which helped inspire New Jersey's Cumulative Impacts Environmental Justice Bill), and We Came and Stayed (PDN Storytellers Award). She most recently completed additional editing on The Lake, an opening-night film of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival (Sundance U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Impact for Change).
Before turning her focus primarily to feature documentaries, Katharine edited for media outlets including PBS, IFC, Sundance Channel, NBA Entertainment, AMC Networks, VICE Media, Nickelodeon, Oxygen, VOOM, Comedy Central, The Nobel Prize Institute, Nabisco, Sports Illustrated for Women, and the American Civil Liberties Union.
Katharine holds an MFA from Columbia University and is known for her collaborative approach, narrative precision, and ability to help filmmakers shape complex stories with emotional clarity. She brings a sharp editorial eye to stories of justice, identity, and the collective human experience.
STORYTELLING IS LIKE FLYING
Katharine gave up her promising career as a trapeze artist to become a filmmaker, driven by her desire to tell visual stories. Her work continues to be informed by the ethereal sensation of freedom that flying brings; nothing compares to the feeling of gliding through the air, the moment of weightlessness and the exhilaration as your wrists are grasped in a perfectly timed catch. For her, creating is a process of overcoming fears, forgetting self, processing life, interpreting people and getting to a place not visited before. There is no greater joy than connecting to an idea, letting it guide you, and then trusting in the process to get to an end.
IN THE BEGINNING
Katharine’s life began in Nigeria, where she was conceived, and the year her parents ended six years of life in Africa. Her father was a New York Times foreign correspondent covering the upheavals of post-colonial Africa. He reported on the warfare that for almost a decade engulfed nations like Congo, which was newly liberated, and Angola, which was struggling for independence. But it was after he voiced support for Biafra's independence that the Nigerian government put a price on his head, and the family fled to Paris. Katharine’s first words were in French; she is still fluent. Thanks to her curious parents, her world has been a wonderful mixture of East, West, North, and South.
ON FINDING FILM
She first discovered filmmaking in her late teens, constructing homemade animated films by bleaching, scratching, and drawing directly onto discarded film she pulled from dumpsters outside the New York City Kodak building. She's been telling stories through moving images ever since.
AWARDS
WEBBY AWARD WINNER
Editor of AMC Digital Video’s Inside Breaking Bad, Webby Award winner.
BARE BONES INTERNATIONAL FF “BEST ANIMATION” AWARD
Awarded for her animated film, Ciao Historia.
NY EXPO FILM & VIDEO SHORTS “JURY AWARD”
Awarded for her animated film, Ciao Historia.
WORLDFEST HOUSTON “SILVER AWARD”
For her animated film, Ciao Historia, which also screened at the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis and the Bellevue Art Museum in Washington, and went on to screen at 18 additional film festivals worldwide.