ABOUT

Claire Ave’Lallemant (she/her) is a queer Emmy® award-winning 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 use real life stories to reach into hearts to change minds—and has been in love with documentaries ever since. 

After assisting on several features, Claire graduated into the main editor seat and has gone on to become a Karen Schmeer Film Editing fellow and Sundance Institute-supported artist recognized for “embracing new forms of storytelling and finding new language to express personal truths.” 

Her credits include feature films such as Flipside (Toronto) and Drowning in Silence (Santa Barbara); series including Choir (Disney+, 2024 IDA’s Best Limited Series nominee), Dogs (Netflix), and The Pharmacist (Netflix); as well as shorts such as Final Finishers (ESPN+, 2026 Outstanding Sports Documentary Short Emmy®) and Translators (Tribeca X, 2023 Best Short Award).

With an appreciation for debating the craft, she has served on the awards juries for the International Documentary Associations’s Best Editing and Best Feature categories, Full Frame Film Festival’s Best Short, as well as Charlotte Film Festival’s Best Documentary. 

Given her own path, it is deeply important for Claire to create opportunities for mentorship within her edit teams regardless of tight schedules or remote collaboration. She creates events including editing masterclasses with a focus on bringing awareness to the unique challenges of nonfiction editing as well as editors into community with one another. 

Claire believes editing documentaries is inherently writing and considers herself to be a storyteller first and foremost. She focuses on projects which aim to bring more compassion into this already challenging world because this work can help reimagine and build the world we want to live in.

While open to exploring projects of all kinds, she is keenly interested in breaking form and stories which center memory, identity, grief, family archives and relationships, generational trauma, queerness, and mental health.

EVENTS

• 2026 DC/DOX Editing Masterclass: Cutting Across Crisis (with American Doctor and The Great Experiment)
• 2026 Carolina Independent Film Collective Talk: Centering Care in Storytelling
• 2025 DC/DOX Editing Masterclass: Timeliness/ Timelessness (with The Perfect Neighbor, Coexistence My Ass!, and 2,000 Meters to Andriivka)
• 2025 Charlotte Film Festival Panel: Meet the Editors
• 2024 Full Frame Panel: Architects of the Story (with Jean Tsien and Flavia de Souza)

ARTIST RESIDENCIES

• 2026 True/False x Catapult Rough Cut Retreat
• 2025 Sundance Institute Documentary Edit Residency