Jessica Sanders with her baby sister.

Just the Facts: Age – 32; Hometown – Santa Monica, California; Education – Film studies and English at Wesleyan University, Connecticut; Employ – repped for film and TV by United Talent Agency; joined Epoch in 2010.

Previous experience: Sanders grew up in a home where her Oscar-winning documentary filmmaking parents, Terry Sanders and Freida Lee Mock, stored film stock in the fridge. Naturally, she gravitated behind the lens. Sanders collaborated with her mom on her first doc, the Oscar-nominated Sing!, in 2002. Her look at wrongful convictions, After Innocence, won the Sundance special jury prize in ’05 and her upcoming film, March of the Living, documents the last generation of Holocaust survivors returning to Poland with teens from around the world. She shot her first broadcast spot for PBS, done in-house, in 2008.

Best work: Sanders turned the camera on herself for Sony “Videography” via 180LA. In the artfully directed piece, she discusses her famous film lineage. “There’s nothing untrue about our story in relation to the product – my dad is a die-hard brand loyalist,” says Sanders. “He would have the hottest Sony camera and I wouldn’t be allowed to touch it until he got the new one and I would inherit the old one.”

Real world to ad world: “I realized a lot of feature filmmakers who I admire, like Spike Lee, directed commercials too,” says Sanders of her move to spots. “For me it seems like an incredibly creative way to use different techniques and cameras that I wouldn’t normally have access to in the documentary world. I shot on 35mm for the first time on the PBS spot. Documentary films can take so long [to produce] that there’s something gratifying and exciting about short form – the challenges of telling a story in a short amount of time and really having control over the frame and the visuals.” CC

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