ABOUT
Claire Ave’Lallemant (she/her) is a queer documentary editor who chose to forgo the traditional college path in favor of a grassroots, hands-on education, beginning as an assistant editor on Cecilia Aldarondo’s Memories of a Penitent Heart (POV). She credits the film with showing her the power of the medium to reach into hearts and change minds—and has been in love with documentaries ever since.
After assisting on several features, Claire was selected for the 2018 Karen Schmeer Film Editing Fellowship. She has since edited feature films such as Flipside (Toronto) and Drowning in Silence (Santa Barbara); series including Choir (Disney+, nominated for the 2024 International Documentary Association’s Best Limited Series), Dogs (Netflix), and The Pharmacist (Netflix); as well as shorts like Final Finishers and Translators (Tribeca X, 2023 Best Short Award). In June 2025, Claire was selected for the Sundance Institute Documentary Edit Residency for her work on the forthcoming feature Vestibule, recognized for “embracing new forms of storytelling and finding new language to express personal truths.”
With an appreciation for debating the craft, she has served on the awards juries for IDA’s Best Editing and Best Feature categories as well as Charlotte Film Festival’s Best Documentary. She is active within the Alliance of Documentary Editors (ADE) as a creator of events with a focus on bringing editors into community to uplift and educate on their unique role. It is deeply important, given her own path, for Claire to create opportunities for mentorship within her edit teams regardless of tight schedules or remote collaboration.
Considering herself to be a storyteller first and foremost, Claire believes editing documentaries is inherently writing and focuses on projects which aim to bring more compassion into this challenging world. Our work can help reimagine and build the world we want to live in. While open to exploring stories of all kinds, she is keenly interested in arthouse approaches as well as those which center LGBTQIA+, women, identity, family archives and relationships, generational trauma, mental health, and memory.
