About

Elyse Frenchman is a documentary filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. She’s worked on Emmy and Peabody Award winning films: True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality (HBO, 2019) and King in the Wilderness (HBO, 2019). In 2020, she produced, directed and edited, John Lewis: His Last March, after joining the late Congressman for what became his final crossing of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. She also co-produced The Soul of America (HBO, 2020), which premiered a week before the 2020 presidential election as a portrait of politics and history in the face of present divisiveness. She recently produced a feature documentary, Fragments of Paradise, which will premiere in late 2022. And since 2017, she has been filming her own documentary, Frozen Dead Guy—an idiosyncratic film about cryonics, death, and joy of life.

Elyse is also an advocate for criminal justice reform. She volunteers with The Parole Preparation Project to prepare people with life sentences in NY State for their parole hearings, works with the Brooklyn Defender Services filming and editing advocacy videos on behalf of their clients and teaches re-entry classes in New York City jails.

Elyse was born and raised in Boston, but spent much of her childhood growing up in Beijing, China. At 20 years-old, Elyse made her first documentary, Citify, about rapid, and often irreparably destructive, urbanization in China—a phenomenon she’d seen over two decades of growing up there. The film screened at the The World Forum on Urban Regeneration in Shanghai and the Beijing Planning and Exhibition Hall.

Elyse is a graduate of the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU. She’s a former professional ice skater, current aspiring slam poet and avid backwoods camper. She lives in Brooklyn, New York along with her trusty bike helmet, Trudy.

CV