About Me

Jessica Q. Chen is an Emmy-winning journalist and content creator whose career has spanned over a decade of experience in video journalism and documentary filmmaking.

Jessica has overseen production and post-production teams for award-winning documentaries and guided the strategy for short docs and series at the L.A. Times. Her work as series producer for L.A. Times Short Docs led to the L.A. Times’ first 2023 Oscar for best short documentary for The Last Repair Shop, directed by Ben Proudfoot and Kris Bowers.

Jessica directed the feature-length documentary Surf Nation, which premiered at the 2022 Mountainfilm festival and won the Santa Cruz Film Festival Audience Award. Prior to the L.A. Times, she was associate producer to Nick Quested and Sebastian Junger for the award-winning National Geographic Documentary Hell On Earth: The Fall of Syria and the Rise of ISIS (Tribeca 2017), and earned an Alfred I. du-Pont Columbia University Award for Excellence in Journalism and Investigative Reporting in 2018.

Jessica has a master's from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and a bachelor's in biology from the University of California, Irvine. Her clients have included National Geographic, the Associated Press, the UN Refugee Agency, UN Foundation, Al Jazeera, WGBH, The Washington Post and Entrepreneur magazine.

Select Accomplishments

2024 Commencement Speaker | Fullerton College

2024 Post Production Advisor | A-Doc Series: Our Stories, Our Voices | Asian American Documentary Network

2023 96th Academy Award Winner for Best Documentary Short | The Last Repair Shop | Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

2023 Gerald Loeb Award, Explanatory Reporting | Repowering the West | UCLA Anderson School 

2022 Emmy Award Winner | Fernandomania @ 40 | 74th Los Angeles Area Emmy Awards 

2021 Executive Leadership Program | Asian American Journalists Association

2020 Emmy Award Nominee | Women of Apollo | 72nd Los Angeles Area Emmy Awards 

2019 LA Press Club First Place, Sports | Caroline Marks Makes Surfing History | L.A. Press Club 

2018 Alfred I. Dupont-Columbia Award | Hell on Earth: The Fall of Syria and the Rise of ISIS | Columbia Journalism School