Campus Directory

Division Arts Division

Department/College/Unit Film and Digital Media Department

Title Professor Emerita of Social Documentation

Affiliation Faculty

Other UCSC Campus Affiliation Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas
Latin American & Latino Studies
Porter College
Merrill College

Faculty Type Emeriti

Web Site

Primary Office Location Kresge College Academic Building

Mail Stop Film and Digital Media

Biography, Education and Training

Over two decades of experience as an award-winning filmmaker of feature and short documentary films, Professor Emirita of Social Documentation Jennifer Maytorena Taylor has built a robust body of cinematic and journalistic non-fiction work. Her productions are regularly seen around the world through broadcast, film festivals, and theatrical screenings at venues like the Sundance, Hot Docs, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Locarno Film Festivals, International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, New York Museum of Modern Art, Sundance Channel, Al Jazeera, NHK-Japan-and frequently on PBS.

Jennifer holds a Masters in Specialized Journalism from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where she also worked as a research fellow and instructor in multimedia journalism. During her tenure at UC Santa Cruz, she served as the Director of Graduate Studies for the Social Documentation MFA program, as the Kenneth R. Corday Family Presidential Chair in Writing for Television & Film, and as the founding Faculty Director of the Social Documentation Lab, a new state-of-the-art post-production and collaborative learning facility located in the Westside Research Park.

Jennifer frequently serves as a mentor for under-represented and emerging non-fiction filmmakers through organizations such as PBS, Latino Public Broadcasting, and Sundance Institute. She is a Sundance Documentary Program Fellow, and has held fellowships at the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism, MacDowell Colony, Points North/Tribeca Film Institute, Banff Centre for the Arts, and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Her work been supported by JustFilms/Ford Foundation, Nathan Cummings Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Latino Public Broadcasting, Sundance Documentary Fund, Fork Films, Catapult Documentary Fund, San Francisco Film Documentary Fund, Hartley Film Foundation and other leading national funders. 

While now emerita faculty, Jennifer continues to work professionally as a producer and director, with several new documentary projects in post-production.

Awards, Honors and Grants