Biography

Sara Newens is a Los-Angeles based filmmaker and Emmy-award winning editor who began her career working for CBS News in New York City. Her first documentary feature, Top Spin, was acquired by First Run Features and received rave reviews from the LA Times and Wall Street Journal during its festival run and theatrical release. She also served as Editor/Writer for Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering’s feature, On The Record, which premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and distributed by HBO Max. She recently completed a second collaboration with Dick and Ziering as Supervising Editor on the HBO documentary series Allen v. Farrow. She is also known for cutting several fiction shorts and co-editing the critically acclaimed indie feature Freeland, as well as directing and editing the award-winning documentary short, Footprint, featured in The New York Times Op-Docs series. A graduate of the MFA Documentary Film and Video Program at Stanford University, she continues to create original work through her production company Wild Pair Films, co-owned by Mina T. Son. Currently, they are developing their next feature entitled Racist Trees, which chronicles a historically Black neighborhood in Palm Springs fighting for the removal of a wall of trees that many residents believe were originally planted as a totem of segregation. In addition, she helms the LA chapter of Video Consortium, a global organization for nonfiction storytellers and video journalists.