David Zieff
- Editor
- Producer
- Editorial Department
For nearly four decades, David Zieff has shaped award-winning documentaries, features and television across music, comedy, and sociopolitical landscapes. Most recently, he edited the Tribeca Festival Spotlight Gloria Gaynor: I Will Survive and Matthew Heineman’s The First Wave, which earned seven Emmy nominations and three wins, including Best Editing. His work on Amazon’s Emmy-winning Wildcat received an IDA nomination for Best Editing.
Zieff’s credits include the Tribeca-opening Time Is Illmatic, chronicling rap icon NAS’s landmark debut album, and Alive Inside, the Sundance Audience Award-winning film exploring music and memory. He also directed and edited McConkey, an Emmy-nominated portrait of the legendary extreme skier, and won a coveted Peabody Award for the documentary mini-series Black Magic.
His numerous Sundance entries include Crazy Love-- which won Best Documentary at the Independent Spirit Awards, for which he was also a producer-- Happy Valley, Amir Bar-Lev’s exploration of the Penn State scandal, and ESPN’s acclaimed Winning Time: Reggie Miller vs. The New York Knicks. Zieff also edited the multi-award-winning Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, shaping 1,600 hours of footage into one of the most celebrated music films of all time. As a creative consultant, Zieff has contributed to dozens of films, including the Oscar-winning The Cove.
A mentor and educator as well as an artist, he was selected to serve as a Creative Advisor at the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Edit & Story Lab and as an adjunct professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Zieff’s credits include the Tribeca-opening Time Is Illmatic, chronicling rap icon NAS’s landmark debut album, and Alive Inside, the Sundance Audience Award-winning film exploring music and memory. He also directed and edited McConkey, an Emmy-nominated portrait of the legendary extreme skier, and won a coveted Peabody Award for the documentary mini-series Black Magic.
His numerous Sundance entries include Crazy Love-- which won Best Documentary at the Independent Spirit Awards, for which he was also a producer-- Happy Valley, Amir Bar-Lev’s exploration of the Penn State scandal, and ESPN’s acclaimed Winning Time: Reggie Miller vs. The New York Knicks. Zieff also edited the multi-award-winning Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, shaping 1,600 hours of footage into one of the most celebrated music films of all time. As a creative consultant, Zieff has contributed to dozens of films, including the Oscar-winning The Cove.
A mentor and educator as well as an artist, he was selected to serve as a Creative Advisor at the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Edit & Story Lab and as an adjunct professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
