Advisory board
Jessica Yu
Jessica Yu is an accomplished filmmaker and writer based in Los Angeles. In The Realms Of The Unreal, Yu’s celebrated feature documentary about “outsider” artist Henry Darger, debuted in competition at Sundance. The film won awards at the Vancouver International Film Festival, the Newport Beach Film Festival, the Atlanta Film Festival and a Gotham Award nomination for Best Documentary. Yu was also nominated for the Writers Guild Award for Documentary Screenplay. Released by Wellspring Films and broadcast on PBS’ P.O.V., Realms was nominated for P.O.V.’s first Primetime Emmy Award (Exceptional Merit in Nonfiction Filmmaking).
Yu's current documentary, Protagonist, which looks at extremism through the lives of a spectrum of individuals, premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim. It also won the Grand Jury Prize at the Atlanta Film Festival and was released by IFC and Red Envelope.
Also in 2007, Yu directed a feature comedy for Cherry Sky Films, called Ping Pong Playa, which she co-wrote with Jimmy Tsai, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. She was also a segment director on HBO’s landmark series Addiction, which was nominated for an IDA Award.
As the first director selected for the John Wells Director Diversity Program, Yu has directed episodes of the NBC dramas “The West Wing,” and “ER,” as well as various other shows including ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy.”
In 1997 she won the 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 won more than 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 a Primetime Emmy and a Cable Ace Award for Best Documentary Director.
Yu’s narrative short Better Late was the debut film for the fXM Shorts Series and was featured in 60 festivals following its premiere at Sundance in 1997. 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.
Additional work includes the popular black & white short Sour Death Balls and Men Of Reenaction, an ITVS documentary about Civil War reenactors. 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 pieces, which have appeared in Los Angeles Times Magazine, Buzz, Worth, and the Pacific News Service. She is a recipient of 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.
In 2000, Yu was the artist-in-residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. She has been a board member of the International Documentary Association, and more recently, an artist trustee of the Sundance Institute.
Yu is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and a Yaddo Fellow and graduated from Yale University, Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude, with a B.A. in English.