Jennifer Yuh Nelson (néeYuh; born May 7, 1972) is an American story artist, character designer, television director, illustrator, and film director. She is best known for directing the films Kung Fu Panda 2, Kung Fu Panda 3, and The Darkest Minds. Yuh is the first woman to solely direct and the first Asian American to direct a major American animated film,[2] and has been recognized as a commercially successful Asian American director.[3]
She won an Annie Award for Best Storyboarding in an Animated Feature Production for directing the opening for Kung Fu Panda and was the second woman nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, for her work on Kung Fu Panda 2. The film proved to be one of the most financially successful films directed by a woman. As a supervisor director for her work on Love, Death & Robots, she won Emmy Awards two consecutive times.
Biography
Yuh was born in 1972 in South Korea and immigrated to the United States with her parents and two sisters when she was four years old. She started sketching and drawing at a young age, while developing an interest with 80s action movies and anime. Her favorite filmmakers were James Cameron, Ridley Scott, and Katsuhiro Otomo. Yuh spent her childhood in Lakewood, California, where she enjoyed watching martial arts movies, playing with cars, and drawing. "I have been drawing since age 3 and making movies in my head for almost as long. In fact, drawing for me was a way to express those films when I had no other means of doing so," said Yuh.[4] As a young girl, she would sit at the kitchen table for hours and watch her mother draw, copying her every stroke. As a kid, she would fancy stories with her sisters and was learning to draw to get down those stories. Yuh traces the lineage of her career to those formative family experiences.[citation needed]
Interested in art, Yuh followed her sisters to California State University, Long Beach,[5] where she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration.[6] There she got introduced to animation, "When I was in college years later, a veteran storyboard artist came to talk to my class. He showed us how he drew movies for a living. My mind exploded. And that led to a career in animation."[4] Jennifer then followed her sisters into the animation industry, at first working as a cleanup artist at Jetlag Productions, where she worked on various direct-to-video features.[4] Following a brief stint at Hanna-Barbera Productions on The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest for Cartoon Network,[7] she was later hired as a storyboard artist on HBO's Todd McFarlane's Spawn series in 1997.[8]
In 2016, Yuh announced that would be making her live action directorial debut with an adaptation of Alexandra Bracken's The Darkest Minds for 20th Century Fox.[13] Producer Shawn Levy praised Jennifer for her visual sensibility as well as her natural narrative qualities. She described herself as soft-spoken, contrary to what contemporary directors are often personified as; instead, she used storyboards to help pitch her ideas to Shawn Levy and 21 Laps.[14]
In June 2019, Yuh was hired as supervising director of the second season of the Netflix animated anthology series, Love, Death & Robots.[15]
^Kim, Elaine H. (2017). "Overcoming barriers to representation". The Routledge Companion to Asian American Media. Taylor & Francis. p. 84. ISBN978-1-317-54084-7.