Keene worked in various capacities in the film industry in Los Angeles while attending graduate school, including positions as a recordist for a sound studio, a dialogue editor in a post-production house, a projectionist, and a re-recording mixer at UCLA.

It was the first film to star the well-known singer and actress Björk, in the role of a young child in a story based on a fairy tale from the Brothers Grimm.

She produced a short film, Aves, in 1994, with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the University of Miami, which used innovative animation techniques to illuminate the spiritual state of a cloistered nun.

She shot Heroine of Hell, a narrative combining medieval iconography with a present-day storyline and starring Catherine Keener and Dermot Mulroney, on location in Miami, completing it in 1995.

The film was shot on location in Madison, Wisconsin and in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in 2001 and was in the final stages of post-production at the time of her death.