Jake Yuzna

Hailing from a family of genre filmmakers, Jake Yuzna is a Minneapolis-based writer, director, and genre curator. Their films have screened at the Cannes Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, London Film Festival, New Museum of Contemporary Art (NYC), and the British Film Institute, among others.

Yuzna is the first American feature director to win the Teddy Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival and has received additional awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital Foundation, Frameline Foundation, McKnight Foundation, IFP, and FilmNorth, as well as a Richard P. Rogers Spirit of Excellence Award from the American Film Institute.

Yuzna founded the cinema program at the Museum of Arts and Design in NYC where they curated the first American retrospectives on Italian Zombie Films, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Dario Argento, Sion Sono, and the medium of VHS. In addition, Yuzna has curated retrospectives on Andrei Tarkovsky, Crispin Glover, H.R. Giger, and Science Fiction cinema of the 1990s. Their curatorial work on genre filmmaking has been collected by the libraries at Yale University and NYU.