Elle Rinaldi is a director, cinematographer, editor, and sound designer based on the Quinnipiac lands of New Haven, Connecticut. In her personal work, Elle practices observational documentary storytelling as a way of attending to the world—actively, passionately, and sensorially—while resisting the urge to control, appropriate, or fragment it. Elle makes films about interspecies relationships, attention, myth, and cultures of spectacle. Her first feature, Highest Nature, chronicles the work of two falconers who train and show birds of prey at Connecticut’s Beardsely Zoo.

Elle studied film at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. She has worked as an assistant sound editor at Warner Brothers Sound, as MoMA PS1’s Digital Marketing and Media Fellow, and is currently freelancing as a documentary director, dp, and editor with clients such as MoMA and Pioneer Works. Her directorial work has screened at film festivals such as DOC NYC and New York Latino Film Festival. Her work has been supported by the American Documentary Film Fund as well as LEF Moving Image Fund.