About Me
Award-winning documentarian Jakob Roston graduated summa cum laude from NYU-Tisch with a double-major in Dramatic Writing and History and is currently completing his MFA in Documentary Filmmaking at UCLA. His films explore rich stories and situations with an inventive point-of-view and a wry sensibility.
Jakob’s two focuses at NYU, screenwriting and history, dovetailed in his first documentary film, about a little-known part of the history of his hometown Orange County, California: the internment, during World War II, of local Japanese farmers. On the fiction front, his stop-motion animated short about a countercultural teenager who sneaks his punk band’s song into the Golden Record (a musical recording NASA sent into space in 1977) was shown at the NASA/Cinespace Film Festival.
At UCLA, Jakob continues to use bricolage and mixed media to create stories about community, identity, and politics. He was awarded a Remap Marty Sklar Innovation Fellowship to expand his technical repertoire. His second-year project, Dancing in Tomorrowland — a documentary short about the young ‘80’s activist who legally challenged Disneyland’s ban on same-sex dancing — won a 2025 Best Student Documentary Award in the American Pavilion’s Emerging Filmmakers showcase at the Cannes International Film Festival. It was also selected for competition at the 2025 Seattle International Film Festival and will show at the 2025 Palm Springs International ShortFest in June.
While Dancing in Tomorrowland continues to garner invitations and accolades, Jakob is putting the finishing touches on his UCLA MFA senior project, Martian Memories, about his quest to better understand his elusive grandfather, a pioneering academic neuroscientist specializing in taste and smell, who served as the longtime chair of Cornell University’s Department of Psychology and Neurobiology, after retirement, continued his research, working with NASA on a project simulating life on Mars.
Outside of working on his own films, Jakob has made social media edits drawn from material in archives for the NBA/WNBA; developed a podcast highlighting members of the New York culinary community for the Museum of Food and Drink in Brooklyn; created videos about the history of Jewish appetizing shops to enhance the Maira Kalman mural in the restaurant of the Jewish Museum in Manhattan; and assisted the editors of Personality Crisis: One Night Only, Martin Scorcese’s documentary about New York Dolls frontman David Johansen.
Contact Me
jakobhr97@gmail.com