[14] While at Brandeis, Granik took Henry Felt's film and media workshop production class and volunteered with the Boston grassroots filmmaking organization Women's Video Collective.

[9][10][15] Snake Feed, which began its life as a 7-minute documentary portrait exercise, was accepted into Sundance Institute's Lab Program for screenwriting and directing.

[17] Granik has said that Snake Feed was a work of narrative fiction, with the main characters, recovering addict Irene and her boyfriend Rick, playing dramatized versions of themselves.

[9][18] Down to the Bone is the story of an upstate New York mother who goes to rehab to kick her cocaine addiction and ends up falling in love with a nurse and descending back into her old drug habits.

[22] It is the story of Ree Dolly, a teenager living in the Missouri's Ozark Mountains who is the sole caretaker of her two younger siblings and her catatonic mother.

[24] In 2011, Winter's Bone was nominated for four Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actress for Jennifer Lawrence and Best Supporting Actor for John Hawkes.

[25] The film featured a soundtrack made up of old time gospel, bluegrass, and traditional music found in the Ozarks and was produced by Steve Peters.

Granik cast many of the supporting roles with first-time actors from the surrounding area and all of the homes on screen were established Ozark homes—no sets were built for this film.

[30] The film is a documentary about a man named Ron Hall, whose nickname is "Stray Dog," and portrays his life as an avid biker and Vietnam Veteran who sometimes struggles with PTSD.

[10][30] Granik directed the drama Leave No Trace, starring Ben Foster and newcomer Thomasin McKenzie, which was released in 2018, domestically by Bleecker Street and internationally by Sony Worldwide Acquisitions.

[36] Leave No Trace took approximately three and a half years to develop, from the first time Granik read Peter Rock's novel, My Abandonment, on which the film was based.

[37] Granik has said that she sees a common thread of press coverage describing her as having a "comeback narrative,"[29] along with questions about how much time has elapsed between projects,[37] partly due to the relatively low output of films in her career compared to the contemporaries she started out with.

She cites Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Shane Meadows, the Dardenne brothers, Laurent Cantet, and Abbas Kiarostami as some of her major influences in her directing career.

[41] Granik is married to Jonathan Scheuer, who has executive produced her films and is Vice Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem.