Elisabeth Haviland James is an Emmy and Peabody winning film producer, director and editor based in Durham, North Carolina, where her company Thornapple Films is headquartered. She launched The Falconbridge Collection with partner Revere La Noue, to house their latest award-winning documentary project, Overland - a global adventure looking at our tenuous relationship to the wild through the lens of three extraordinary characters engaged in the ancient art of falconry. 

James is currently making a film about the creation of Damien Geter’s new Opera, Loving V. Virginia. She was the Producer and Editor of The Loving Story (co-produced with HBO, dir. Nancy Buirski) for which she was short-listed for the Academy Award, winner of a George Foster Peabody Award and an Emmy Award (Best Historic Program) and nominated for two additional Emmy Awards (Best Documentary, Best Editing). The film screened in festivals around the United States, and as a participant in the Sundance Film Forward program, with the US Department of State and with the American Film Showcase. It premiered on Valentine’s Day, 2012 on HBO, and was later optioned and became the basis of the narrative feature Loving.

Her latest project as Producer and Editor is Harley Flanagan: Wired For Chaos (dir. Rex Miller), which will premiere in 2024. She was the editor of Rissi Palmer: Still Here (director Dilsey Davis) which premiered on American Masters in 2023. James is the producer and editor of Exposing Muybridge, a documentary about groundbreaking photographer Eadward Muybridge, most famous for stopping the horse in motion. It is currently on the festival circuit, and premiered in November 2021 at DOC NYC. She is also the editor of the third episode of Apple TV+’s  Lincoln’s Dilemma, which launched in February 2022 to great critical acclaim.  In 2019, she was commissioned to write and curate a “fulldome documentary,” Tales of the American South, by the University of North Carolina’s Morehead Planetarium and the Center for the Study of the American South, using an innovative approach to historical storytelling usually reserved for science films. James served as the head editor for the third and fourth seasons (26 episodes) of the PBS Series A Craftsman’s Legacy.  In 2015 James was named one of two film fellows in the state by the North Carolina Arts Council. She was the Producer and Editor of Althea, (dir Rex Miller), a feature documentary about pioneering tennis icon Althea Gibson, which was the season opener for PBS’ prestigious American Masters series in September 2015, has played to great acclaim in festivals around the country (DOCNYC, Full Frame, Athena, Palm Beach, American Black Film Festival), and is included in the Emmy Nomination for Best Arts Series this year. Her documentary feature-directing debut, In So Many Words, premiered at the 2013 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and has screened at festivals, museums and conferences around the country.

James is a graduate of the M.A. Program in Documentary Film and Video at Stanford University.  In 1999, she earned a BSFS with honors from the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where she majored in Culture and Politics. She is fluent in French and speaks some Spanish, and has led tours for art museums, botanic gardens and cultural institutions around the world, including to France, Spain, Italy, Russia, Argentina, Mexico, Japan, Korea, Thailand and Vietnam. James has taught documentary filmmaking at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies and as an artist in residence at the Oklahoma Arts Institute; she has also served as a guest lecturer for the State Department in Central Asia and Europe. She is a former board member of the Southern Documentary Fund and an active member of the Documentary Producer’s Alliance. James is married to frequent collaborator, artist and filmmaker Revere La Noue; the two have a daughter and two naughty dogs.