Meet Brooke Sebold

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Brooke Sebold. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Brooke below.

Brooke , thrilled to have you on the platform as I think our readers can really benefit from your insights and experiences. In particular, we’d love to hear about how you think about burnout, avoiding or overcoming burnout, etc.
Thanks for having me here and inviting me to share my burnout journey with you (which ironically has been wildly illuminating). It all started when I fell in love with movies at 12 years old as a coping mechanism to escape my painful reality. At the time, I had just beaten impossible odds (< 3%) by surviving a freak skiing accident that left me with severe internal injuries to my liver, and a femur broken in 3 places. I spent my 12th and 13th years in and out of hospitals, bound to my bed, consuming the majority of Blockbuster’s VHS collection and becoming their most valued customer. My recovery was treacherous and non-linear, and I learned to rely on films, stories and invented worlds to survive my own life.
As I got older, filmmaking became both my passion and obsession. For me, there was no greater high than creating a cinematic work that evoked feeling and thought in others and allowed me to express those ideas most meaningful to me. I relied on filmmaking as a tool to explore my own experience and perspective. It was my calling and my purpose, and with filmmaking as my north star, I never questioned my own direction.
Eventually I found my way toward editing films, which provided a different form of satisfaction and fulfillment in assembling all the fragmented pieces into a story that makes emotional and logical sense. The world is a confusing mess, but within my editing software, my timelines were clean, my shots well labeled, and every cut I made created meaning and order in the story I was telling. Making sense of the chaos of my raw footage provided me with a false sense of control in the world.
Then, about ten years ago, I survived the most excruciating break up in the history of all time… or that’s what it felt like, anyway. And so I did the one thing I always knew to do when the pain in my life became too overwhelming to bear. I escaped into film and stories.
I dove head first into every project I could, writing and editing around the clock, while also directing 20+ short videos for Planned Parenthood, using my storytelling as my brand of activism and doing my part to save the world from misogyny while simultaneously running from my own personal pain.
It was those Planned Parenthood pieces that finally broke me, turning my black hair to silver and my slim frame to nearing frail within a matter of months.
I imagine burnout looks different for everyone, but for me, burning out meant that I suddenly detested the one thing I had always relied upon for joy and escape. I couldn’t even sit through a movie anymore, much less dedicate my entire existence to making them. Perhaps even more devastating than hating the thing I once loved is that I also turned on myself. My gentle and reliable inner voice became angry and bitter. I had always been my own harshest critic, but now I was downright abusive. My relationship with filmmaking had turned toxic, and without my familiar means of escape, I was forced to sit in my present reality and finally confront my unresolved pain.
Recovering from burnout took years, and I wish I could say that I’ve developed a handy checklist for overcoming it, but for me it took a whole lot of time and space and of letting go, over and over again. Losing my passion and drive for filmmaking meant letting go of who I thought I was, of my identity as a filmmaker and editor, and storyteller, which meant also letting go of what I saw as my purpose, my north star and my dream for my future.
And as I was letting go of all these different pieces that once had meant so much to me, I also had to fall in love with a world beyond the emotionally fabricated reality of film. I had to fall in love with my everyday life, my community and myself just as passionately as I once had loved film. I had to learn and relearn, as a lived experience in my body, that who I am is more than what I do.
And I did it! I let go of it all and fell in love with the world! And little by little, slowly over time, I fell in love with film again, too – but differently this time. These days, I’m no longer obsessed, I’m balanced. I’m still a human who makes films, but I’m far more than a filmmaker. I’m an artist and partner and sibling and seeker. I’m the creator of my own experience. Some days I love what I do, and other days I hate it, but all days, it never defines me.
And now, years later, one thing I know to be true about myself is this: when I hear my own inner voice start to turn on me and my love for my art and myself begins to wane, I know that burnout is on the ominous horizon. And then I take a deep breath and shift my focus toward the multitude of other things and people in my life that also bring me joy – because there are infinite ways to experience joy in this world beyond film and remembering that simple fact is the only antidote to burnout I’ve found.


Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
Sure thing! I’m a nonbinary filmmaker whose work frequently investigates gender and identity in doc and narrative spaces. I’m passionate about creating meaningful content that evolves culture through storytelling.
My first feature documentary, RED WITHOUT BLUE, explores the relationship between two identical twins as one transitions from male to female. It screened at 150+ film festivals, and received a dozen awards including the Audience Award at Slamdance and the Jury Award at Frameline.
Recently, I co-produced and edited the feature documentary FRAMING AGNES – a multidimensional glimpse at transgender life from the 1950s to today – which was named a Best Movie of the Year by The New Yorker after premiering at the Sundance Film Festival where it won the NEXT Innovator Award and the NEXT Audience Award.
Currently, I’m creating a series called I CHANGED MY MIND, which aims to normalize what the changing mind looks like through conversations with guests who have changed their mind about something leading to a personal paradigm shift. The project is produced in partnership with Second Peninsula and funded by The Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley.
I’m also the lead editor on the Emmy nominated series, BRIEF BUT SPECTACULAR, which airs weekly on PBS NewsHour. The intention of the series is to elicit empathy from the viewer by presenting original voices on universal subjects and inviting the audience to walk in someone else’s shoes.
Regardless of whether I’m writing, directing or editing, my work consistently aims to make the world a better place, which is an intention I carry into my personal life as well. As a volunteer Crisis Counselor for the Trevor Project, I chat regularly with suicidal queer youth, providing an empathetic ear and reminding them that we are all worthy of being loved, valued, and seen.
These days, I find my own joy and gratitude in simple pleasures like playing with my little doggy Luca or exploring the hills of Silver Lake with my partner. My intention is to continue making things I love with people I love. For me, that’s living the dream.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
(1) Empathy – As a filmmaker, empathy is essential in order to be an effective storyteller. If you want viewers to feel something from your work, you must first get comfortable listening to the stories of others and empathizing with their experiences.
(2) Collaboration – Collaboration is crucial to executing ideas on a large scale and also to forming and maintaining long-lasting relationships. Relationships are essential to filmmaking, and to life in general. Without collaboration skills, you’ll always be an island, and as a filmmaker and a human, that’s not sustainable (or enjoyable).
(3) Flexibility – Even in the best of circumstances, nothing materializes quite as expected and the ability to be flexible and pivot is essential, especially in filmmaking when you are frequently putting out fires and creatively problem solving.

The advice I would give to folks early on in their journey is to let go of rigid timelines and expectations of what things should look like. So much is beyond our control when we set out to make a film, and there can be magic in the unfolding if you aren’t fixated on how you thought it should be or what you hoped it would look like. Find your joy in the process because if you aren’t enjoying the doing, the end result will never make up for the misery of the journey.

Before we go, maybe you can tell us a bit about your parents and what you feel was the most impactful thing they did for you?
I want to acknowledge my immense privilege here because my parents have loved and supported me throughout my entire life. They valued education highly, and financially supported me through college and – beyond the scholarships I was able to secure for myself – as much as they could through grad school as well. This allowed me to graduate from Columbia Film School with only 13k in debt which was 10-20 times lower than many of my friends. This immense financial privilege allowed me to pursue internships and low-paying jobs in the industry post graduation, which many of my friends could not afford to do. On the practical side of things, funding the majority of my education was one of the most impactful things that they could ever have done for me.
Beyond that, my mom’s emotional support and eternal faith in me throughout the years has been my greatest privilege. From early on, my mom recognized that I was a high achiever and that I prioritized work above all else, and so she did her best to remind me to appreciate the beauty of the present moment. Every single day growing up, she would interrupt whatever schoolwork I was pouring over to drag me outside and watch the magnificent Arizona sunset. In the 20+ years since I’ve left the nest, she regularly texts me pictures of her sunsets to remind me to take a break and appreciate the beauty in this life. My mom is a wise soul who has taught me countless lessons over the years, but this one, which she taught by example, was the most impactful for an overachiever like me.

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Image Credits
Taylor Servedio Meredith Adelaide

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