Jess X. Snow is an Academy Award-shortlisted filmmaker, muralist, and author born in Canada, of JiangXi Chinese heritage. With four short films currently streaming on the Criterion Channel, through an immersive, surrealist and emotionally-driven lens, their films bring the interior lives of flawed Asian migrants to the big screen. Recently named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film, they have written & directed a body of boldly visual short films that screened at university classrooms and festivals around the world including: International Film Festival Rotterdam, BFI London, Short Shorts (Tokyo), SFFilm, BlackStar, New Orleans, Ann Arbor, Reel Asian (National Film Board of Canada Best Short Award), Durban International Film Festival (Special Mention of the Jury).
They served as a cinematographer and producer on the Academy-Award Shortlisted documentary short, WE WERE THE SCENERY which won the 2025 Sundance Short Film Jury Award for Non-Fiction and played at 70+ festivals including Visions Du Réel, Sheffield Docfest, Doc NYC Shortlist and was named a best short of the year by Film Comment, Vimeo Staff Picks and Cinema Eye Honors. They served as cinematographer on the documentary feature, THIRD ACT (Sundance, BlackStar, Full Frame 2025) distributed by ITVS. They received their MFA in writing/directing from NYU in 2023 where they received the Sloan Production Award for Science in Film.
They are in late development for WHEN THE RIVER SPLIT OPEN, their debut fiction feature; a surreal road movie romance following a non-binary Chinese American’s search for their estranged father, set in their ancestral lands of JiangXi, China. It was supported by Cine Qua Non Lab, Film Independent Producing Lab and Fast Track, Labocine's Science New Wave Fund and Canada Council for the Arts.
