TEACHING & MENTORSHIP

Passing on the craft — and the machinery.

From 2022 to 2024 I was a professor of Non-Fiction Editing at Seneca Polytechnic's Documentary Film Institute (Seneca@York) — teaching in the same Documentary & Non-Fiction Media Production program I graduated from in 2017.

I taught the part of documentary that rarely makes it into a syllabus: how a film actually gets made after the shoot. Not just where the cuts go, but how you prep a project so it can be cut at all — organizing footage, building workflows, syncing multicam, managing media across a feature or an eight-part series, and delivering clean for sound and online. The goal was never to turn out button-pushers. It was to give editors enough command of their tools that the tools disappear, and only the story is left.

That runs straight through everything I believe about this work: knowing your craft and knowing your machinery are the same discipline. A student who understands why a workflow is built the way it is makes better creative choices in the edit, not worse ones. I tried to teach both at once.

Seneca paused the program amid Canada's cap on incoming international students, so the classroom is on hold — but the teaching isn't. On my own productions I still train assistant editors and editorial interns, bringing them into real posts on real films: the messy, unglamorous, deadline-lit reality of getting a documentary finished. It's the best classroom there is.

If you're a student, an emerging editor, or a production looking for someone to mentor your post team, get in touch.