About

Danya Abt was raised in Chicago, Illinois and Detroit, Michigan and fell in love with writing and photography at a young age. She found cinema to be a marriage of these two passions and pursued a bachelor’s degree in Visual Art from Oberlin College and a hands-on education in filmmaking in New York.

Her first film, Food Water Revolution, captures the early days of Iraq Veterans Against the War and played at MOMA’s Documentary Fortnight. She continued to remain involved with the group and later worked with IVAW to produce Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan, a 3-day televised speak-out by young veterans that was covered widely by the independent press and was an important moment in the antiwar movement. In the following years Danya worked on a documentary about the Chad-Cameroon Pipeline, living in Cameroon for part of the time. She then worked as a producer for Grit TV with Laura Flanders, editing and shooting segments for the show. Danya continued to grow her career as an editor directing films in her available time. As a fellow of Uniondocs Collaborative Studio Danya made Eric Winter to Spring, a Vimeo Staff Pick featured at the True/False and Camden Film Festivals. Her work has shown at the Traverse City Film Festival, the Athens International Film Festival, DOC NYC, Rooftop Films and many others.

Danya has worked on series for networks such as Showtime, Hulu, PBS and the History Channel. Feature editing projects include Mark Levinson’s The Universe in a Grain of Sand, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Science New Wave Film Festival. Recent projects for Art21 profile the artist Camille Henrot and the artist collective I Wanna Be With You Everywhere. The recently completed film Iakwe (d. Nathan Fitch) is currently touring festivals, as is Kenneth Murphy’s Cirrus. Her most recent project is a 6-part series about the political future of the American South, Long Play, streaming on YouTube.

Danya teaches filmmaking and editing part-time at the New School’s liberal arts college and Parsons Media Studies program. She is an active member of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective and the Alliance of Documentary Editors.