Meryl O’Connor is an Alaskan born, Brooklyn-based queer filmmaker and editor working in both narrative and documentary. Her award-winning fiction shorts have screened at festivals internationally, including in Cannes La Cinef program, where she premiered “The Ballad of Finn and Yeti.” As an editor, she works primarily on documentaries focused on environmental and social justice issues, including the award-winning documentary features, “Pigeon Kings” and “Hollow Tree.” Her editing work has been featured at DOC NYC, NOFF, SIFF, and VIFF, MOMA, the Museum of Moving Image, and on The Atlantic and PBS. Her feature script, “The Waiting Dead” was a finalist for American Zoetrope and her latest script “Ignore/Delete” was a semi-finalist for the Tony Cox Award. She received her MFA in film directing from UCLA.
Before shifting into film, she studied studio art at NYU as well as at Yale’s Norfolk painting program and worked as an art director for Warner Music Group, primarily working with Atlantic Records. Her background in art and design informs her visually stylized and idiosyncratic approach to the stories she tells.