Claire Atherton

Claire Atherton is a film editor. In 2019, she received the Vision Award Ticinomoda on the occasion of the 72nd edition of the Locarno International Film Festival, becoming the first woman to receive the award. She was born in 1963 in San Francisco, U.S. She grew up in New-York, then in Paris. She now works and lives in France. She is the sister of Sonia Wieder-Atherton.

Attracted very young by Taoist philosophy and Chinese ideograms, she spent a few months in China in 1980, at the Institute of Foreign Language in Beijing. Then she enrolled at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations in Paris.

Atherton had her first work experience in 1982, in Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir in Paris where she worked as video technician. In 1984, she enrolled in the professional branch of the École Nationale Supérieure Louis-Lumière in Paris from which she graduated in 1986. She then started to work on sound and image for some of the productions of Centre Simone de Beauvoir and various other projects. From the 1990s onwards, Atherton started to mainly focus on film editing.

She met with Chantal Akerman in 1984 on the occasion of the theater adaptation of Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963 by Sylvia Plath which was played by Delphine Seyrig at the Petit théâtre de Paris. Seyrig asked Akerman and Atherton to film the performance

This episode marked the beginning of a 31-year collaboration between the filmmaker and the film editor, first behind the camera and then on film editing. Atherton worked with Akerman on her documentaries, fictions and installations, up until No Home Movie and NOW, an installation which was presented at the Venice Biennale in 2015.Nowadays Atherton is in charge of the conception and spatialization of Akerman's installations, which are presented on the occasion of exhibitions in the entire world.

Atherton also works with many other filmmakers and artists. Among them are Luc Decaster, Emilio Pacull, Noëlle Pujol, Andreas Bolm, Emmanuelle Demoris, Elsa Quinette, Christine Seghezzi, Christophe Bisson, Olivier Dury and Éric Baudelaire and many others.

In 2013, the Cinémathèque de Grenoble, France, organized an event dedicated to Atherton's work as film editor. It’s the first retrospective dedicated to the body of work of an editor.

She is often invited to give master classes with young filmmakers during workshops in France and internationally. She also teaches in cinema and art schools such as La Fémis and at the HEAD School in Geneva, Switzerland.

In 2019, she received the Vision Award Ticinomoda on the occasion of the 72nd edition of the Locarno International Film Festival, becoming the first woman to receive the award which since 2013 "both highlights and pays tribute to someone whose creative work behind the scenes, as well as in their own right, has contributed to opening up new perspectives in film".