Jean de Segonzac

Jean de Segonzac
Jean de Segonzac in 2006
Other names	Jean DeSegonzac
Occupation	Director, screenwriter, cinematographer
Years active	1985-present

Jean de Segonzac (sometimes credited as Jean DeSegonzac) is an American director, screenwriter and cinematographer who has worked in documentaries and television programs. Most of his work has been in gritty, cinéma vérité-style law enforcement TV dramas.

Jean de Segonzac was born to Adalbert and Madeleine de Segonzac, the youngest of four children (his siblings include Lionel de Segonzac, Catherine Shainberg, and Laurence de Segonzac). His father (whose nickname was "Ziggy") was a French journalist who was the chief U.S. correspondent for France Soir in Washington, D.C., for two decades as well as a former president of the Foreign Press Association. Jean de Segonzac graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1975.

His first known credit was as cinematographer on the documentary film Born on the Fourth of July in 1985. His second major work was Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989), followed by Crack USA: County Under Siege, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature (his camera work was called "intrusive" by one reviewer). He next worked on the 1991 documentary Where Are We? Our Trip Through America (1992) which followed gay filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman as they went from small town to small town, interviewing local people.Newsday said, "The film owes much of its success to director of photography Jean De Segonzac, whose alert camera takes in such eccentric details as a copy of The New Sweden on the coffee table of a model mobile home and a kitten lapping water from a miniature kidney-shaped pool.