Jen Heck

Jen Heck is an American writer, director, and producer best known for her award-winning films. Her work has appeared at the Whitney Biennial (2004), and at major film festivals including the Sundance Film Festival, the São Paulo International Film Festival, the Palm Springs International Film Festival and the Hamptons International Film Festival. Her stories are often described as "quirky", with themes of love, isolation, and the delicate nature of relationships between young women commonly recurring. Her signature visual style often incorporates found or pre-existing media with rich, original material to create a unique, heavily stylized narrative result.

Her current project, "The Promised Band," is a feature-length documentary about a group of women in Israel and Palestine who start a fake band as a way to explore their taboo friendships. The band is a metaphor for the greater society, with each character playing an archetypal role. The band struggles and fails for the same reasons the society itself struggles and fails, and when the women are able to achieve a modest triumph, the film posits that women in warring societies may be the key to peace. "The Promised Band" premiered at the Cinequest Film Festival in March 2016 and took home both the Award for Best Documentary and the Canon Filmmaker Award.

Heck's work has garnered a number of other awards and nominations as well, including honors from New York Women in Film and Television, the Iris Prize, Zurich's Pink Apple, the Short Movie Awards, the Provincetown International Film Festival, the Big Muddy Film Festival, and Newfest.

She has also worked as a shooter and producer at networks including MTV, VH1, G4/TechTV, Current TV, and Bravo. She has shadow directed on Showtime's Dexter (with Steve Shill) and TNT's Leverage (with Rod Hardy.)

In 2008, Heck traveled to the tallest peak in the world, Mount Everest, where she lived with a professional climbing team as part of her research for an upcoming feature film.

She currently lives in New York City and resides part-time in Los Angeles, California.