Jenni Olson

Jenni Olson is an American lesbian filmmaker, film historian, and archivist, born in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, in 1962, who is one of the foremost authorities on LGBTQ+ film history. In 1992 she moved to San Francisco to guest-curate the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival for Frameline, later becoming its co-director, before leaving to co-found the website PlanetOut.com, where she created the PopcornQ section devoted to queer film. Her 2005 book, The Queer Movie Poster Book, was a Lambda Literary Award nominee, and her personal archive of LGBTQ+ film prints and memorabilia was acquired by the Harvard Film Archive in 2020. She is also known as a filmmaker for The Royal Road (2015), a meditative essay film about lesbian longing, California, and film history. Olson has been a bridge between the history of queer filmmaking and its contemporary inheritors, publishing a retrospective chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema (2021).