Jenni Olson
1. Jenni Olson was born and raised in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. She received her BA in Film Studies from the University of Minnesota in 1990. She was the founder of the Minneapolis/St. Paul Lesbian, Gay, Bi, & Transgender Film Festival in 1986 and went on to be co-director (with Mark Finch) of the San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival from 1992-1994. She is the editor of The Ultimate Guide to Lesbian & Gay Film and Video (1996, Serpent's Tail). Her feature-length collections of coming attractions trailers (Homo Promo, Neo Homo Promo, and Trailer Camp) have played at film festivals around the world, as have her two short videos (Levi's 501s Commercial and Sometimes). (From her personal summary found on http://www.imdb.com)
2.The Joy of Life (2005)
Afro Promo (1997)
Blue Diary (1997)
Trailers Schmailers (1997)
Trailer Camp (1995)
Homo Promo (1993)
She's Safe!: A Curated Package of Woman-to-Woman Safer-Sex Videos (1993)
These are the films she has directed
3. Her film The Joy of LIfe (2005) appeared at the Sundance Film Festival in 2005. I do know from looking at the synopsis of her films that they do deal with gay and lesbian issues a lot of the time. She also does work mostly on documentaries.
4. As I said earlier, I found her film The Joy of Life on the Sundance Film Festival website for the year 2005. The Sundance is a relatively big festival and certainly one where great independent films can become discovered.
5. I thought it would probably be easy to find a woman director on the Sundance Festival site because they deal with a lot of independent films. I have to admit however that I looked up about ten films on imdb from the list in Sundance before I came across a woman director. It didn't take very long, but like I said, I came across about ten male directors of films in the festival before I found Jenni Olson.