Stephanie Filo

55 Years Old

Stephanie Filo, ACE is a four-time Emmy Award-winning film and television editor, Peabody Award recipient, and ACE Eddie Award winner. Based in Los Angeles, California, and Sierra Leone, West Africa, she is also a passionate activist committed to global social justice. Filo serves on the board of Girls Empowerment Sierra Leone, a feminist organization supporting girls aged 11–16. She is also a co-founder of End Ebola Now, launched in 2014 to raise awareness about the Ebola crisis through artistic community activism. Beyond her editorial work in film and television, Filo dedicates much of her time to producing and editing social justice campaigns and documentaries, with a strong focus on women's and girls' rights worldwide. Her work has included collaborations with the United Nations, the International Labour Organisation, and the Obama White House Task Force's It’s On Us campaign to combat campus sexual assault. Her activism and creative work have been featured in Forbes, Entertainment Tonight, Al Jazeera, Yahoo, Telegraph UK, and more. Filo earned an Emmy nomination for the Mental State episode Ageing Out, addressing youth aging out of foster care, and won an Emmy for Separated, which tackled ICE deportations—making her and collaborator Nzinga Blake the first Sierra Leonean women to win an Emmy. In 2021, she made history with HBO’s A Black Lady Sketch Show, as part of the first all-Women of Colour editing team to win the Emmy for Outstanding Picture Editing for Variety Programming. She repeated history in 2022 as a member of the first all-Black editing team to win both an Emmy and an ACE Eddie for the same show. In 2023, she became the first picture editor—and the first Black editor—nominated for three different series in a single Emmy season. She received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for her work on the acclaimed feature film We Grown Now.