- Flash Flaherty: Tales from a Film Seminar (Indiana, 2021) with Scott MacDonald
- Documentary Across Platforms : Reverse Engineering Media, Politics, and Place (Indiana, 2019)
- Open Space New Media Documentary: A Toolkit forTheory and Practice (Routledge, 2018) with Helen De Michiel
- The Flaherty: Decades in the Cause of Independent Film (Indiana University Press, 2017), with Scott MacDonald
- Open Spaces: Openings, Closings, and Thresholds of Independent Public Media (University of St. Andrews Press, 2016)
- Thinking Through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places (Palgrave, 2015, with Dale Hudson)
- Mining the Home Movie: Excavations into Historical and Cultural Memories, anthology co-edited with Karen Ishizuka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
- States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000)
- Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995)
Books
Books in Progress and Forthcoming
- Digital Habitats: Transnational New Media and the Environment (Indiana, contracted) with Dale Hudson
- The BFI DocMedia Book (Bloomsbury, contracted), coedited with Hend Alawadhi, Tomas Crowder, Gail Vanstone, Brian Winston
Exploring a wonderfully diverse range of documentary projects that includes installation pieces, archives, still photography, community-based collaborative media, experimental shorts and video art, the essays analyze how work is done, by whom, for whom, to what end, and why these questions matter."
~Richard Shpuntoff, Documentary
"Zimmermann's invitations to reassess and engage in her own work have taken several forms over the past twenty-five years. They include essays for journals or exhibition catalogs, books, magazine articles, public presentations, handouts for public screenings, and postulates to arouse further conversation. They incorporate personal accounts, deep dives into the archival record, theoretical musings, and the occasional call to arms. Now one can read a thematically arranged selection of this remarkable career in a new collection."
~Melissa Dollman, The Moving Image