LOS ANGELES — Heeyeon Chang had been on the red carpet before. So although it was exciting to see celebrities from television hits like “Everybody Loves Raymond” and “Desperate Housewives,” it just wasn’t the same as last year.
Instead, the second time around was so much better. This year, Chang and the rest of the 14-person crew from “The Amazing Race” won the Emmy for “Outstanding Picture Editing for Nonfiction Programming” on Sept. 11 at the Shrine Auditorium.

“I’m still in the glow of winning the Emmy. It was surprising to hear because I didn’t think we had a chance,” Chang says over a week later with a laugh. “It was all a surprise, a pleasant surprise, and I never thought it would become an actuality.”
The reality is that “The Amazing Race” beat out the nominees from “The Apprentice,” “The Contender” and “Survivor” at the Creative Arts Ceremony (which is separate from the televised Primetime Emmy Awards held a week later) for the golden statuette.

For the 30-year-old Chang, such an accomplishment didn’t come on a on a silver platter. It took years of studying art and video installation at the University of California, Irvine, and then attending graduate school at the California Institute of the Arts.

“Deep down, I’ve wanted to do something more independent and creative,” says Chang, who emigrated from Seoul in 1977 at the age of 2.

Her artwork was getting displayed at galleries and museums in Los Angeles like the Skirball Cultural Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art as part of group exhibitions. Chang was at a point she calls “the peak of [her] career.”

But she was searching for something else to express her individuality, and had always dreamed of becoming a filmmaker.

While Chang was making a living as a graphic designer for merchandising and Web-based companies, an opportunity to work in the film industry opened, thanks to a stroke of luck. “I dropped everything when I thought I had a chance to work on an AVID [editing system],” says Chang. (Read more about this path on page 28.)
Now she finds herself in a dark room for hours upon hours a day, finding the best footage captured from all over the world and then piecing it together to tell a narrative for the show that has been hailed by critics as the “classiest, least objectionable of reality shows.”

“Of course I love being social, but it takes a lot of discipline and focus to function alone in a dark room for that long of a time,” she says. “You have to be very independent to be an editor, to work television. A television show is such a huge group endeavor. So it’s both. You get the satisfaction of both.”

It also takes a lot of dedication and motivation, of which Chang has plenty to spare. “After [luck], it’s all up to me to go forward,” she says.