Thelma Schoonmaker

THELMA SCHOONMAKER (Editor) is a three-time Academy Award winner, having worked for more than forty years alongside the filmmaker Martin Scorsese.
Schoonmaker has been honored with Oscars most recently in 2007 for her work on Scorsese’s The Departed and in 2004 for his film The Aviator. In 1981, she won both the Academy Award and BAFTA (British Film Institute) Award for editing Scorsese's film Raging Bull. Subsequently she worked on all of Scorsese's features: The King of Comedy, After Hours, The Color of Money, The Last Temptation of Christ, the Life Lessons segment from New York Stories, GoodFellas (which earned her another BAFTA Award as well as an Oscar nomination), Cape Fear, The Age of Innocence, Casino, Kundun, Bringing Out the Dead, Gangs of New York, for which she received the editor’s guild ACE Eddie Award and was nominated for an Academy Award, and, most recently, Shutter Island, Hugo for which she received another Oscar nomination, The Wolf of Wall Street and Silence.
In 2019, she edited Scorsese’s The Irishman, and was nominated for an Academy Award as well as the editor’s guild ACE Eddie Award for her work. That same year she was honored with the BAFTA Lifetime Fellowship, the highest accolade the British Film Academy can bestow.
In 2022, Schoonmaker received an Academy Award nomination for editing Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. This nomination marked her ninth Oscar nod overall, breaking the record for the most nominations in the film editing category. She also received a BAFTA Award nomination for her work on the film.
Schoonmaker also edited Scorsese's documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, a BBC/Channel Four co-production, commemorating the centenary of motion pictures, and Scorsese’s documentary about Italian cinema, Il Mio Viaggio in Italia.
Ms. Schoonmaker was born in Algiers, where her father worked for the Standard Oil Company. She grew up on the island of Aruba and attended Cornell University, where she studied political science and Russian, intending to become a diplomat. While doing graduate work at Columbia University, she answered a New York Times ad offering on-the-job training as an assistant film editor. The exposure sparked a desire to learn more about editing.
During a six-week summer course at New York University's film school, she met Martin Scorsese and Michael Wadleigh. Within a few years, she was editing Scorsese's first feature Who's That Knocking At My Door? She then edited a series of films and commercials before supervising the editing of Wadleigh's 1971 film Woodstock, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award.
In addition to her film editing, Schoonmaker works tirelessly to promote the films and writings of her late husband, the director Michael Powell, among them, The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, I Know Where I’m Going, A Matter of Life and Death, Tales of Hoffmann and Peeping Tom.