Lena Park

Lena Park edits Trumpwatcher's craft and genre coverage. She holds an MFA in Screenwriting from Columbia University's School of the Arts, where she focused on structural analysis, and has spent the eight years since graduation working as a screenwriter on independent television projects and short-form scripted comedy. Her perspective on film criticism is unapologetically a writer's perspective: she reads a movie the way a chef reads a kitchen, looking at the choices the screenwriter and director made before the camera ever rolled.

Lena's areas of focus are the films that work hardest at the level of structure — psychological thrillers built around unreliable narrators, mystery dramas where the reveal recontextualizes everything before it, slow-burn character studies, and minimalist single-location pieces that depend on what is not shown. She is particularly interested in how non-linear storytelling earns its complexity, and in the screenplay craft that turns a premise into a watchable film rather than a clever pitch.

Outside her editing duties at Trumpwatcher, Lena writes a monthly newsletter on screenplay structure for working writers and occasionally teaches workshops at independent film co-ops in the Northeast. She does not accept work from films she may eventually be hired to write on, and Trumpwatcher rotates any review where a conflict of interest could arise to another byline. She believes that knowing how a film was built makes the experience of watching it richer, not poorer. Reach her through the contact form.