About

Director and producer Jennifer Maytorena Taylor’s award-winning feature and short documentary films frequently feature bilingual Spanish/English elements and explore themes such as gentrification battles, queer dance celebrations, Latin American Dirty Wars, Puerto Rican American Muslim hip-hop culture, families coping with mass incarceration and extreme sentencing laws – and most recently, rural and small-town life in an era of refugee crises, the opioid epidemic and White rage.

Jennifer’s work has shown at venues like the Sundance, Camden, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Locarno Film Festivals, Hot Docs, IDFA, DOC NYC, NY Museum of Modern Art, Sundance Channel, Al Jazeera, NHK-Japan, and very often on PBS. Born in Los Angeles of mixed Mexican and Anglo descent, Jennifer is primarily based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she directs the Social Documentation MFA program. She has held fellowships at institutions such as the Banff Centre for the Arts, USC Annenberg School for Journalism, Points North Institute, MacDowell Colony, and is a Sundance Documentary Institute fellow.