Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult

Inbal B. Lessner, ACE, is an Emmy®- and Eddie-nominated editor and producer. On her latest project, “Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult”—which she co-created with her filmmaking partner, director Cecilia Peck—she takes on the roles of lead editor, writer and executive producer. This four-part documentary series, premiering on STARZ, follows one young woman’s perilous journey through the dark and criminal world of NXIVM, the notorious self-help group turned sex-slave cult.

Lessner and Peck’s last collaboration was the Emmy®-nominated feature documentary Brave Miss World, which debuted on Netflix in 2014. It is the story of an Israeli beauty queen who was raped seven weeks prior to her winning the Miss World pageant and her crusade to reach out to fellow survivors while trying to keep her own rapist behind bars.

In 2019, Lessner edited and coproduced “The Movies” (“The Golden Age” episode), executive produced by Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman and Mark Herzog. This was the latest in her four-year-long collaboration with the team that produced CNN’s Emmy®-nominated “Decades” series. She has edited seven episodes in the series, and she was nominated for an ACE Editing Award for “The Nineties” episode “Can We All Get Along?”

Lessner’s editing credits include ReMastered: The Two Killings of Sam Cooke (Netflix Original, Dir. Kelly Duane), which was nominated for an Outstanding Documentary NAACP Image Award, as well as Autism: The Sequel (HBO, Dir. Tricia Regan), a follow-up to the Emmy®-winning Autism: The Musical (2007). She edited and coproduced the internationally acclaimed, award-winning I Have Never Forgotten You, a documentary about Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal. She also directed the docudrama Night Bites, and she was second-unit producer on the HBO/ARTE documentary Watermarks.

Over the course of her career, Lessner has worked in the cutting rooms of directors such as Davis Guggenheim (Teach), R.J. Cutler (“American Candidate”), Kief Davidson and Daniel Junge (A Lego Brickumentary), Jeremy Simmons (“Transgeneration”), Tracy Droz Tragos (Be Good, Smile Pretty) and Natalie Portman (A Tale of Love and Darkness).

Lessner began making films when she was in high school and later produced training films for the Israel Defense Forces. At NYU, she was the recipient of the prestigious, merit-based WTC Johnson Fellowship, which is awarded to one student filmmaker a year. Since moving to Los Angeles, she has edited hundreds of hours of non-scripted network and cable television shows. She was also a visiting professor at UNCSA Filmmaking School and a mentor in the Karen Schmeer Diversity in the Edit Room Program.

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