Jessica Yu is a filmmaker based in Los Angeles. She won the 1997 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short for BREATHING LESSONS: THE LIFE AND WORK OF MARK O'BRIEN, an intimate portrait of the writer who lived for four decades paralyzed by polio and confined to an iron lung. The film also won over 20 festival awards, including the IDA Achievement Award, the Audience Award at Aspen Shortsfest, and First Prize at the St. Petersburg International Film Festival, since its debut at the Sundance Film Festival. She also won an Emmy and a Cable Ace Award for Best Documentary Director.
Yu's current documentary, PROTAGONIST, looks at extremism through the lives of a spectrum of individuals. Funded by Carr Foundation, it will premiere at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. Recently she also directed a story for HBO's upcoming documentary special, ADDICTION.
IN THE REALMS OF THE UNREAL, Yu's celebrated feature documentary about the enigmatic \outsider\" artist Henry Darger, debuted in competition at Sundance. REALMS won Best Documentary at the Vancouver International Film Festival, Best Documentary at the Newport Beach Film Festival, Best Editing at the Atlanta Film Festival and a Gotham Award nomination for Best Documentary. She was also nominated for the Writers Guild Award for Documentary Screenplay. Released nationally by Wellspring Films and broadcast on PBS' independent documentary series, P.O.V., REALMS was nominated for P.O.V.'s first Primetime Emmy Award (Exceptional Merit in Nonfiction Filmmaking) and featured on several publications' 2004 \"top ten\" lists, including the Christian Science Monitor.
Yu's film THE LIVING MUSEUM, the award-winning HBO documentary about an art community in a New York mental institution, premiered at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival. Yu's narrative short BETTER LATE was the debut film for the fXM Shorts Series. It has been featured in 60 festivals since its premiere at Sundance 1997, and it won First Prize for Short Drama at the New York Festivals. Her other films include MEN OF REENACTION, a documentary about Civil War reenactors, for which she received grants from ITVS and NEA the popular black & white short SOUR DEATH BALLS, which won several awards, including Best Live Action Short at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, was featured at Berlin, Sundance, Telluride, Toronto, San Francisco, Sydney and the national PBS series ALIVE TV THE CONDUCTOR, a musical comedy short featuring Mark Salzman (IRON AND SILK) and the documentary HOME BASE, winner of several festival awards. She also directs commercials with Nonfiction Spots of Santa Monica, for which she has won a New York Emmy.
Yu has also written articles and fiction for the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Buzz, Worth, and the Pacific News Service. She received the Murrow Award for Journalism from the Skeptics Society, the DREAM Media Award from the Western Law Center for Disability Rights and ACV's Asian American Media Award. She has lectured at various universities and conferences. She is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and a Yaddo Fellow. Yu graduated from Yale University, Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude, with a B.A. in English.
Yu is currently prepping to shoot her first narrative feature, a comedy she has co-written with Jimmy Tsai. It will be produced by Cherry Sky Films in early 2007.