Jacqueline Elyse Rosenthal

I started my career as an actress about 20 years ago, but I found that the kind of storytelling I wanted to do was creating original stories, so I took the leap to writing and directing. I started with commercials and worked my way up from there, and I've been directing for about 10 years now. I recently received my Master's in Fine Arts from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, where I was the John Houston directing scholar, which was a really formative time for me. One of my most notable achievements is making a film called Backlog about the Rape Kit Backlogs - it's a short film that's being developed into a feature right now, and it helped change policy in a lot of states in the United States for rape kit reform. Right now, I'm developing 4 to 5 future films, and the day-to-day is basically a daily sync of the progress with each. The wonderful thing about being a filmmaker is there are definitely different stages of production and different things that are called for from you at each stage. I didn't see the films that I wanted to be seeing, so I decided to make them. I feel like I was put on this planet to make films about people who overcome impossible circumstances.