Biography

Aileen started her career editing commercials. Her first spot for Little Ceasars starred an indecisive orangutan and won an Addy. Aileen went on to cut film trailers and television promotions. While crafting a promotion for HBO's on-demand boxing, Aileen came up with the idea of structuring the fighters' faceoff like a western film. This storytelling structure defined the brand for a decade. Short-format marketing and advertising gave Aileen skills in pacing, branding, and music editing-craft she has carried over into other projects ever since.

After three years in marketing and advertising, Aileen moved on to make more of a meaningful impact working on documentaries. Over a 10-year career, she worked on 24 documentaries as a director, producer, and/or editor. Two specials for CBS's 48Hours, "Birth of a Militia" and "Murder She Wrote", drew in tens of millions of viewers. Specializing in verité documentary filmmaking, she often edited stories, without a script, from 200-300 hours of footage. She worked on gritty projects that covered gun violence, corporate fraud, and mobster Sammy "the Bull" Gravano. Her stories aired on ABC, truTV, and A&E.

She explored independent film and edited "Snake Feed" (short film winner of Sundance Grand Jury Prize) and the surfer documentary, "The Billabong Odyssey." Aileen gained experience in scripted narratives when she joined a west side theater group and workshopped one and three-act plays.

In 1999 television producers began to invite Aileen to direct. She started art directing title graphics for HBO and b-roll shoots for 48Hours. Her first live-action television directing credits were show opens for two CNN documentaries. In 2002, her independent documentary film "Witnessing" premiered at the first Tribeca Film Festival and aired on MSNBC. It is now part of the permanent collection in the 911 Memorial Museum.

Aileen has studied script development and genre at London's Script Factory.

She is developing two independent film projects.
- IMDb mini biography by: collaborator, Lorri Leighton