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Monique Zavistovski

Los Angeles, California, United States
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MoniqueZavistovski
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Bio

Born in New York City, Monique was raised by two classical musicians on the edge of the Sleepy Hollow woods in Washington Irving’s hometown of Irvington, New York.


She graduated in 2001 from the University of Southern California's Master of Fine Arts program in Cinematic Arts with a focus on documentary production and editing, and she holds a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. 

Films Monique has edited have won awards worldwide including at the Sundance Film Festival, Los Angeles Film Festival, South By Southwest Film Festival and at the Emmys. She is the winner of the 2006 INSIGHT award for Excellence in Editing for her work on The Shape of Water, narrated by Susan Sarandon.

At the start of her career, Monique worked with filmmaker Peter Forgacs on his Getty Center installation, The Danube Exodus, and with artist Judy Chicago for her permanent installation of The Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. In 2003, a Cameroonian short narrative she edited, Mboutoukou, won the Jury Prize at South By Southwest and at over a dozen film festivals worldwide. In 2006, The Wraith of Cobble Hill, which Monique produced and edited, won the Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking at the Sundance Film Festival and was short-listed for the Academy Awards. The following year, Circus Rosaire, a feature doc she edited about a circus family of animal trainers, premiered at Slamdance and went on to win several Best Feature Doc and Audience Awards.


More recently, Monique's editing and writing work includes the PBS film The Legend of Pancho Barnes and the Happy Bottom Riding Club, featuring Kathy Bates and Tom Skerritt, which won the Emmy Award for Best Film in the Historical Category, several Audience and Best Feature Doc awards, and Best Editing at DOCUTAH. In 2012 she cut The Light In Her Eyes, a window into a Qu’ran school for girls in Syria, which aired on POV and toured the world with the Sundance Institute's Film Forward series. She also edited Limited Partnership (an epic love story that defined a movement; 2014 LA Film Festival; aired on Independent Lens; Winner 2015 IDA Humanitas Award), The Diplomat (ESPN 9 for 9 film about East German figure skater Katarina Witt who outsmarted a dictatorship to win her freedom; 2013 Tribeca Film Festival) and Life After Manson (a notorious Manson killer breaks her silence after 45 years in prison; 2014 Tribeca Film Festival; NYT Op-Doc). She is currently cutting CITY 40 about a closed nuclear city in the heart of Russia where a single mother risks her life to expose the truth in one of the most contaminated places on earth (executive produced by André Singer of the Academy-Award nominated The Act of Killing).

Monique is also a co-author of the memoir Children and Fish Don’t Talk: Adventures with Nazis, Communists and the Metropolitan Opera (2013, Sunstone Press) and her directorial debut, The Pursuit of Happiness, a short doc about the legacy of prescription anti-depressants in the U.S., premiered at the 2002 New Orleans Film Festival. It was called, “The strongest of the films,” at the Women in the Director’s Chair Festival. She currently resides in Los Angeles with her daughter and husband, filmmaker and artist, Adam Parrish King.