Jessica Yu (b. 1966 USA) is an accomplished film director, writer, producer and editor. Yu graduated from Yale University with a BA in English and moved on to film making where she quickly rose to fame with her short film, Sour Death Balls. Her films have premiered all over the world and have received numerous honors. In 1997, Yu won the Academy Award for Best Documentary/Short Subject film for her film Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O'Brien, a portrait of the poet-journalist who lived for forty years confined by polio into an iron lung. Her first feature length film, The Living Museum, documented an art community at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, New York, and aired on HBO in the summer of 1999. In The Realms Of The Unreal, Yu's celebrated feature documentary about “outsider” artist Henry Darger, debuted in competition at Sundance in 2004. The film won awards at the Vancouver International Film Festival, the Newport Beach Film Festival, the Atlanta Film Festival and a Gotham Award nomination for Best Documentary. Yu was also nominated for the Writers Guild Award for Documentary Screenplay. Released by Wellspring Films and broadcast on PBS' P.O.V., Realms was nominated for P.O.V.'s first Primetime Emmy Award (Exceptional Merit in Nonfiction Filmmaking). Her 2007 documentary, "Protagonist," a story about destructive obsession, featured a Greek chorus of wooden puppets, also premiered at Sundance.

Jessica Yu has also directed episodes of Grey's Anatomy, ER and The West Wing.She has written articles and fiction pieces, which have appeared in Los Angeles Times Magazine, Buzz, Worth, and the Pacific News Service. She is a recipient of the Murrow Award for Journalism from the Skeptics Society, the DREAM Media Award from the Western Law Center for Disability Rights and ACV's Asian American Media Award. Jessica Yu lives in California.

Jessica Yu spent September 2000 in the artist apartment editing a fundraising trailer for her new film about the life and work of Henry Darger. Darger lived a reclusive life and died alone in a Catholic mission in 1973. For more than 60 years, he created a massive literary and graphic body of work in his apartment, including The Realms of the Unreal, an epic, fifteen-thousand-page novel with hundreds of paintings that recounts the wars between nations on an enormous unnamed planet. Yu returned in March, 2001 to premier the trailer and talk about making the film. Darger's room and belongings had been left undisturbed in his apartment after he relocated to the mission that provided a unique portal into his world. In March 2005 Yu returned again to show the finished film entitled, A Cast of Thrillions: Documenting The Life and Art of Henry Darger and do a Q&A.

During her visit in 2001, Jessica Yu also worked with Jeremy Ward's third grade class from the Lawrence School. Before Yu arrived the students visited the museum and explored the Gothic Room and the Long Gallery. Each student chose an object that interested or excited them, and wrote a poem inspired by it. Yu filmed the students as they recited their poetry in the galleries and edited the footage, juxtaposing the readers with a time-lapse film of the courtyard, objects from the collection, and recordings of music sung and played by the students at school. On the fourth day, the students were shown the completed film while Yu discussed the process of how she made it.