Jennifer Maytorena Taylor

I make films about real people with extraordinary stories, often engaging with questions of individual and collective agency in situations of challenge and crisis. My films frequently use bilingual Spanish/English elements and explore themes like land use and gentrification battles, sexual violence, Latin American Dirty Wars, Puerto Rican American Muslim hip-hop culture post 9/11, the school-to-jail track, the work of gang interventionists, families coping with extreme sentencing laws – and most recently, rural and small-town life in an era of refugee crises, the opioid epidemic and “white rage.”My work has shown at venues like the Sundance, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Locarno Film Festivals, International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, New York Museum of Modern Art, PBS, Sundance Channel, Al Jazeera, and NHK-Japan. I am an Associate Professor in the Film and Digital Media Department and the Social Documentation MFA program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.