Jennifer Yuh Nelson
| Jennifer Yuh Nelson | |
|---|---|
Jennifer Yuh Nelson in May 2012 at the C2-MTL business conference
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| Born |
Jennifer Yuh May 7, 1972 South Korea |
| Residence | United States |
| Education | Bachelor of Fine Arts |
| Alma mater | California State University, Long Beach |
| Occupation | Director, storyboard artist |
| Years active | 1994-present |
| Employer | DreamWorks Animation |
| Notable work | Kung Fu Panda 2 |
Jennifer Yuh Nelson, also known as Jennifer Yuh (born May 7, 1972), is an American director and storyboard artist. She is best known for her directorial debut Kung Fu Panda 2. Yuh is the first woman to solely direct an animated feature from a major Hollywood studio.
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. After the film proved to be one of the most financially successful films directed by a woman, Yuh returned to direct Kung Fu Panda 3, released on January 29, 2016.
Yuh was born in 1972 in South Korea and immigrated to the United States with her parents and two sisters when she was 4 years old. 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. 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.
Interested in art, Yuh followed her sisters to California State University, Long Beach, where she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration. 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." Jennifer then followed her sisters into an animation business - at first as a cleanup artist at Jetlag Productions, where she worked on various direct-to-video features. In 1997, she got hired as a storyboard artist on HBO's Todd McFarlane's Spawn series.
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