My Friend, Aurora De Lucia, a Woman in Male-Dominated Role, has Now Made 1,000 Episodes of TV
Meeting Aurora
I first met Aurora in 2021 through TikTok. We exchanged numbers and have been friends ever since. She recently hit a major career milestone (plus it’s almost her birthday!), so I wanted to do a little write-up introducing you to my friend.
Against All Odds
According to a report by the USC Annenberg School, there is a gender gap of 5.3 men to every 1 woman working behind the camera, with women making up only 15.5% of editors. Aurora De Lucia is in that 15.5%.
One of Aurora’s earliest assistant editor credits was on a show with zero female editors. Not one. But recently, she was the Supervising Post Producer and Lead Editor on a show whose full-time editors were all women.
A Career on the Shoulders of Other Women in Television
Aurora’s first television credit was as a production assistant on America’s Got Talent, early in her college career. Initially hired for only two days to help with the weekend-long local Boston auditions, Aurora’s temporary boss, Elyse Foley, a high-level producer on the show, noticed the attention to detail that Aurora brought to the job and requested that Aurora not only help in the local Boston auditions, but also assist in the rest of the audition cities that season, such as New York and Miami.
Aurora attended school at Berklee College of Music during the week and flew out to different cities to work on America’s Got Talent on the weekends. The following year, Aurora worked in more audition cities, including Portland, Dallas, and Las Vegas. That season, Aurora dropped out of college (partly due to dealing with a congenital heart defect), went to Los Angeles, and continued working on the weekly episodes throughout the summer ‘til the season five finale.
As the America’s Got Talent season wound down, Aurora walked around the CBS Television City lot where they taped, holding a stack of physical resumes, seeing if she could find more work on any production there. She wasn’t confident that would actually work, but Skating with the Stars took her up on her offer and hired her as a production assistant.
She freelanced in various roles, and over and over again, career moves came with the help of powerful women. When Aurora was struggling to keep a roof over her head between some of her lower-level gigs, she received a very opportune phone call from Graciela Bracaccini, a producer whom she’d met on AGT, asking if Aurora could come to Vegas to work in the story department on Model Latina, transcribing scenes and taking notes for producers; having room and board paid on top of a salary was a boon for early-career Aurora.
Not long after returning to Los Angeles a couple of months later, post supervisor Kelly Ficklin gave Aurora her first assistant editing job. Aurora had been studying a technical, software-heavy major at Berklee.
So, Kelly believed Aurora could pick up Avid pretty fast – which she did. Aurora used the momentum of that first AE job and became an assistant editor on several shows, including Shahs of Sunset, I Wanna Marry “Harry,” and Ultimate Survival Alaska. Then Tonya Dreher, an Emmy-nominated editor and incredible senior producer, gave Aurora her first job as an editor on The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore.
Speaking of powerful women, one of the stories I’ve loved hearing about Aurora’s career was when she was building a career retrospective video to play at the Writers Guild of America Awards before Diane Keaton presented Nancy Meyers (talk about powerful women!) with the Laurel Award for Screenwriting – the WGA’s lifetime achievement award.
Aurora said she was a little intimidated by the experience: “Nancy Meyers is such a wonderfully nice woman, but obviously she’s a beloved giant of film. When editing, I’m generally used to sitting alone for much of the day, often preparing a cut – even if quickly – by myself, before showing it to people. But Nancy spent days sitting next to me in the editing bay as we explored her whole career.
It was a little nerve-racking to edit in real-time in front of a living legend – but what an honor to spend several hours over multiple days with such a talented superstar and to hear about her life. A gift!”
A Storied Career
Aurora has had an illustrious career with most of it even still to come! She has not wasted her prodigious opportunities, continually converting them into even more – she’s edited for social justice luminaries LeBron James and Ava DuVernay, plus additional megastars like Will Smith. She also supervised the post department for three shows led by the queen of homemaking, Martha Stewart.
Aurora has worked on shows airing on 33 different networks. She’s worked on television in nine cities and a couple of different countries, including Mexico, where she became scuba certified. She’s now a certified Rescue Scuba Diver, meaning if anything goes wrong in the ocean, she’s ready to save your life!
Aurora consistently fights for more opportunities for all workers in film and champions women’s equality. She walked picket lines at every single studio in LA County where picketing was occurring during the 2023 WGA & SAG-AFTRA strikes, and even attended some in New York too.
I’m happy to have known Aurora for 4 years and I can’t wait to see what she does in the next 40!
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About the Author
Name: Arielle Schmitt
Professional Title: Content Creator
Bio: Arielle Schmitt is a content creator with 200,000+ followers, specializing in storytelling in women’s sports. She’s an all-around hype woman, championing and celebrating women pushing boundaries and chasing big goals.
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