purcellcarson [at] gmail      
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Purcell Carson is a documentary filmmaker and editor.  She’s served as a lead creative partner editing character-driven, observational documentaries, including the Oscar-winning Smile Pinki and Semper Fi: Always Faithful, which won best-editing from the Tribeca Film Festival. Simple as Water, a cinema verité portrait following Syrian refugees in five countries, is her latest feature edit and an IDA nominee for best editing.

Purcell's directorial work is connected to Trenton, New Jersey and Princeton University, where she teaches a seminar in urban studies and film and directs a community-engaged documentary program, The Trenton Project.  Together with students and colleagues, Purcell has been researching, documenting, and designing public programming focused on the city in the 1960s. That work is the foundation for her forthcoming film, Harlan B. Joseph Was Here.  In addition, based on her research during a Fulbright year in the Western highlands of Guatemala, Purcell is directing an essay film, La Vida No Termina  about Central American migration to New Jersey.

Purcell has taught filmmaking for ten years.  She is a MacDowell fellow, an mentor in the Karen Schmeer Editing Film Editing Fellowship, and a member of the Alliance of Documentary Editors, all of which offer a platform to explore the ways documentary work, and editing in particular, resemble and differ from other forms of non-fiction inquiry.