Karen Pearlman, ASE

Karen Pearlman ASE is the director of An Editor's Anthology, a trilogy of short films about historical women editors (2016, 2018 & 2020). Between them, these films, which reclaim and recognise the creative work of historical women filmmakers, have won 34 highly competitive national and international awards from peak industry bodies and film festivals, including 3 for best editing, 3 for best directing and 6 for best documentary.

Her 2020 film, I want to make a film about women, was long-listed for an Oscar and nominated for an Australian Academy Award. The special jury prize citation from the Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival reads: "a film of innovative brilliance, celebrating the inexhaustible, essential tenacity of suppressed artists everywhere".

Her 2023 film, Impossible Image, which puts 21st century filmmakers into a conversation with the creative agency of women in silent screen, has been presented at over 30 international film festivals, winning 2 prizes for best documentary and 1 for best screendance.

Karen is the author of the widely used textbook on editing, Cutting Rhythms (Focal Press), now in its 2nd edition and with translations into Chinese, Korean, Arabic and Turkish.

Her work has reached audiences of over one million people through collaboratively made research YouTube videos called The Science of Editing.

Karen is a director, with Richard James Allen, of The Physical TV Company (physicaltv.com.au), whose documentary, drama, and dance films have been broadcast on ABC and SBS-TV, screened at over 400 film festivals on six continents, garnering well over 100 awards or nominations, and added to the collections of 10 major film archives around the world.

Karen is an Associate Professor in Screen Production and Practice at Macquarie University, the 2020 Australian Research leader in Film. She is a deputy director of the Creative Documentary Research Centre with a portfolio in Creative Practice and Screen Culture.

Many of Karen's research publications can be accessed here: mq.academia.edu/KarenPearlman.

Filmography

	WOMAN WITH AN EDITING BENCH » Inspired by a true story, Woman with an editing bench pays homage to the creativity of Elizaveta Svilova - the unsung editor behind Dziga Vertov's 1929 documentary masterpiece Man with a Movie Camera (No 1 on the 'Sight and Sound' list of Best Documentaries of all time)...
	EDITOR'S ANTHOLOGY, AN » An anthology of three award-winning short films by Karen Pearlman ASE, about women and cinema: Woman with an editing bench, After the facts and I want to make a film about women...
	AFTER THE FACTS » In the early years of cinema, editors were usually women. This short documentary by Karen Pearlman ASE looks at how they wielded power, and how their work was made invisible...
	I WANT TO MAKE A FILM ABOUT WOMEN » A queer, speculative, documentary love letter to Russian constructivist women. It asks what the revolutionary women artists of the 1920s said, what they did, and what they might have created had it not been for Stalin's suppression...