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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.  Also short-listed for the Oscar were Semper Fi: Always Faithful, which won best-editing from the Tribeca Film Festival for its look at toxic water contamination on US military bases, and Simple as Water, an IDA best-editing nominee for its portrait of Syrian refugees. Purcell is currently editing an essay film, Death and Taxes, about... death and taxes.

Purcell's directorial work is connected to Trenton, New Jersey and Princeton University, where she has taught a seminar in urban studies and film and directed a community-engaged documentary program, The Trenton Project, for the past ten years.  Together with students and colleagues, Purcell has been researching, documenting, and designing public programming focused on the city. That work is the foundation for her forthcoming film, Harlan B. Joseph Was Here, made in collaboration with historian Alison Isenberg.  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. That work, and related student projects, has been the foundation of collaboration with filmmakers in both the US and Guatemala.

Purcell is a MacDowell fellow, a 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, and editing in particular, resemble and differ from other forms of non-fiction inquiry.