Yana Gorskaya - Film Editor - Spellbound to Lucky

Yana Gorskaya was born in Russia, and emigrated to the United States with her mother at the age of six. Yana was hired to edit her first feature film, 2002's Spellbound, when director Jeffrey Blitz asked his former USC mentor Kate Amend if she would recommend one of her students to work on his documentary film and she suggested Yana, who was working as a teaching assistant while completing her MFA. She worked part-time on the editing of Spellbound from 2000–2002. Spellbound was ultimately nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and Yana won the American Cinema Editors Award for Best Edited Documentary.  Her next three features, also documentaries, were In the Name of Love , produced by Sydney Pollack, about Russian marriage agencies, Sonny Boy, directed by Soleil Moon Frye, focusing on Frye's relationship with her father, Virgil Frye, and Seeds, about the Seeds of Peace Camp in Maine. Yana's first non-documentary feature was Rocket Science, with which she worked with Jeffrey Blitz for a second time. She then edited the independent comedy film Smart People.  Yana was a consulting editor on Taika Waititi's film Boy.  Yana also edited Blitz's 2nd documentary about lottery winners, called Lucky.