Since 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 The Dodo, the Cobble Hill Health Center, the 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.
Betsy’s work as a screenwriter has received several recent accolades. Her thriller pilot, PRICELESS, was selected in 2023 for The Writers Lab NYC and the Stowe Narrative Lab, and in 2024 for the Nostos Screenwriting Retreats and as one of the inaugural 30 scripts on The Women’s List. Its placements in other contests, including writersXwriters (finalist), the Atlanta Film Festival Screenwriting Competition, the Cinestory Retreats and Fellowship, Creative Screenwriting Fellowship, LA International Screenplay Awards Diversity Initiative, WeScreenplay Diverse Voices Fellowship, the ISA FastTrack Fellowship, and Moonshot Pilot Accelerator, has it consistently ranked in the top 1-2% of projects on Coverfly. Her newest screenplay, the comedy thriller feature SHE DONE IT, has thus far placed in the Screencraft Screenwriting Fellowship (semifinalist) and Cinestory Feature Retreat.
Betsy’s experience on set also includes her 25+ years miking everyone from Carrie Bradshaw to Elmo as a location sound person on series that include Pose, The Blacklist, The Good Wife, The Sopranos, Jessica Jones, Elementary, Girls, Power, and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. 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 on her Substack, Smartypants.