Dena Mermelstein has been involved in non-fiction filmmaking for close to twenty years. After graduating from college, she had the good fortune to collaborate with two-time Academy Award winner Barbara Kopple on several films produced for labor unions. Since then, she has concentrated on documentary editing, with a focus on social issue projects. With a love for story structure, character development, visual language and rhythm and pacing, editing has been a natural fit.

Dena has edited documentaries that have premiered at numerous film festivals and have aired on PBS, A&E, National Geographic and Discovery. In collaboration with various translators, she has cut films in American Sign Language (ASL), Burmese, French, Ga, German, Hawaiian, Hindi, Korean, Pular, Spanish, Toma and Zulu. Career highlights include a Best Documentary Award at the Tribeca Film Festival and Independent Lens airing of Chiefs (Dir: Daniel Junge; Prod: Donna Dewey & Henry Ansbacher), a film that chronicles the lives of high school basketball players on an Indian reservation in Wyoming as they navigate poverty, racism, addiction, joblessness and cultural identity; a Gracie Award and Emmy nomination for National Geographic’s Slave Girls of India (Dir: Rakhi Varma; Series Prod: Kim Woodard), an in-depth look at girl labor in India; a Cine Golden Eagle award and P.O.V. airing of American Aloha: Hula Beyond Hawai'i (Dir: Lisette Flanary & Evann Siebens), a celebration and reexamination of the ancient art of Hula; a Margaret Mead Film Festival screening and PBS airing of North Korea: Beyond the DMZ (Dir: J.T. Takagi & Hye-Jung Park), a film that follows a Korean-American woman as she journeys to meet relatives in North Korea for the first time; a Human Rights Watch Film Festival screening of 900 Women (Dir: Laleh Khadivi; Prod: Jonathan Stack), an intimate portrait of five women residing at a Louisiana prison; and an editing Emmy nomination for the PBS children’s series, Reading Rainbow. Dena recently finished editing for Deaf Jam (Dir: Judy Lieff), an ITVS and NEA funded documentary that follows Deaf teenagers in New York City as they learn American Sign Language poetry while dealing with the pressures of growing up in a hearing world.

Dena has also taught video production to teenagers, videotaped clinic defense actions with the Women’s Health Action and Mobilization (WHAM!) and studied photography at the International Center of Photography. At the University of Michigan, she majored in English literature and creative writing and was honored with a Hopwood Award in poetry. It was in Ann Arbor that she became an intrepid activist, canvassing and protesting with such organizations as SANE/Freeze and the Free South Africa Coordinating Committee and volunteering at the campus’s shelter for runaway and homeless youth,
Ozone House.

Dena lives in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn with her husband, the talented animation artist Jason McDonald, and their
three-year old son, Hugo.