Bella Smith

PRESENTLY: Bella is a Production Coordinator at Muddy Water (muddywater.co) helping with 4 feature-length documentaries. She edits with Caveh Zahedi on his TV series "The Show About The Show" and "Getting Stoned with Caveh." WHAT I'M LOOKING FOR: Bella would be overjoyed to help out with any part of production — research, interviewing, filming, assisting on set, editing, etc. She is particularly interested in PA, production coordinator, editor, and camera operator roles. It is important to her that she finds opportunities to further master her editing skills. She is most drawn to narrative docufiction, personal/gonzo documentary, and political documentaries (especially concerning incarceration, systemic analyses of climate change, whiteness and US racism, and mental illness/psychiatry). BACKGROUND: Bella graduated in 2022 and spent this past year doing work exchanges in Europe. She was living and working in a backpacker's hostel in Berlin for most of it and afterwards, joined a Buddhist monastery in Thailand for a month. Now, she resides in Crown Heights, where she serves at an Italian restaurant and does video stuff. While at Duke, she diligently studied US policy and journalism. She took time off from college to lobby for policies that decarbonize transit within Congress and the Biden-Harris team while serving as a Policy Advisor to the lead green transit thinktank. Dismayed and disillusioned from her time on The Hill, she returned to Duke to finally pursue her longtime passion (and calling, she might add) for documentary. Bella buddied up with film professors and equipment managers, spent all her time working on film projects and volunteering to get friends’ off the ground, stayed at the equipment cage late to figure out exactly how to assemble and operate all different types of rigs: from dollies and sliders, jibs, gimbals, remote follow focus, lights, booms and lavs, all of it. Towards the end of her final year, Bella had ingratiated herself with the MFA kids and was known as a gear-head on every set she worked on. She'd spend 60 hours in a windowless editing bay, churning out her next video, and loving every minute of it. She even fled mid-semester for a month to film the 2021 Sunrise Movement Hunger Strike in DC. Like so many in the new generation of video, she grew up on Youtube and has a special reverence for small, scrappy productions.