Bio

Since foolishly jumping with no life experience right from undergrad at Stanford University into earning her MFA in film production at NYU, Betsy has made her living on sets and in edit rooms while finding a voice in her own projects. Her most recent documentary is the 2021 short The Halloween House, about how one man’s obsession with scariness brings together his Brooklyn neighborhood. Her producing and directing credits include interviews with activists working for progressive change for the Mobilize Podcast; videos for the campaign of New York State Senate candidate Alessandra Biaggi, and for the websites of Code Liberation Foundation and the Working Families Party; and video letters for the popular Nickelodeon television show, Blue’s Clues. Her documentary feature Flat Daddy, which looks at the impact of the war in Iraq on four military families from around the United States, premiered at DOC NYC in 2011. The film screened at the Maine International, Atlanta, and Montclair Film Festivals, was awarded Best Educational Film at the 2012 Las Vegas Film Festival, was broadcast on PBS America and now streams on demand. Her work as a digital video editor includes social media pieces for Brick Education, APIA-Vote Michigan, Family Equality, Wake Up & Vote Creative Consortium, the Muscular Dystrophy Association, The Dodo, Swing Left, the New York Women’s Foundation, the campaign of Lauren Underwood for Congress, and Carnegie Hall’s LinkUP! Series, and fundraising trailers for documentaries on the crash of TWA Flight 800, the gubernatorial campaign of Zephyr Teachout, and the Epic Theater Company, an NYC-based organization that works with performers on the autism spectrum.

Then there’s the 25+ years Betsy has spent doing location sound on series that include Pose, The Blacklist, The Good Wife, The Sopranos, Jessica Jones, Elementary, Girls, Power, and The Marvelous Mrs Maisel. She’s learned quite a bit watching writers and directors work while wiring everyone from Carrie Bradshaw to Elmo, and been motivated to write her own capers and comedies (a couple of which have placed in screenplay competitions), centered around the types of complicated women that she wants to see portrayed. Her personal essays on her work in the business have been published on the literary sites Fresh Yarn and Revolving Floor, and she continues to blog about that and her never-ending midlife crisis here.

Last but not least, in 2014, Betsy and partner Damon Holzborn formed Rustle Works, a studio that develops interactive tools and toys for creative people, including the recent word puzzle game little words; the Twitter bot @jerrybotheimer, which generates pitches for Hollywood blockbusters; and an interactive story game on media ethics for the website of the textbook “Think/Point/Shoot: Media Ethics, Technology, and Global Change.”