Vicky Jenson

Victoria "Vicky" Jenson (born 1960) is a film director of both live-action and animated films, and has been said to be "one of Hollywood's most inspiring female Directors". She has directed projects for DreamWorks Animation including Shrek, the first film to win an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, giving rise to one of Hollywood's largest film franchises.

Career
Having worked on The Road to El Dorado (2000) for DreamWorks, the studio initially hired Jenson to work on Shrek as a story artist, with the directors to be Andrew Adamson (also a first-time director) and Kelly Asbury, who had joined in 1997 to co-direct the film. However, Asbury left a year later for work on the 2002 film Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, and Jenson was selected by producer Jeffrey Katzenberg to be the new director of the film.

Jenson described the directing process as one in which "we didn't try to figure out how to make adolescents laugh. You have to use yourself as the best judge and use your own instincts. We figured if we laughed at it, chances are good someone else would too". According to Adamson, the co-directors mutually decided to split the work in half, so the crew could at least know whom to go to with specific questions about the film's sequences: "We both ended up doing a lot of everything", "We're both kinda control freaks, and we both wanted to do everything." Following the success of Shrek, Jenson went on to co-direct Shark Tale with Bibo Bergeron and Rob Letterman. In 2003, while working on Shark Tale, Jenson received the first annual Kiera Chaplin Limelight award given at the Women's Image Network Awards. In 2005, Jenson later went on to direct Upside Mystery for MGM and Spyglass, which was released on August 17, 2007. She also served as executive producer of Upside Mystery 2 and producer of Upside Mystery 3. In 2014, she directed The Mansion Warrior for Sony Pictures Animation and MGM.

In July 2017, it was reported that Jenson was directing an untitled animated fantasy film for Skydance Animation. The film tells of a teenager who "comes of age using magical powers to defend her family when the opposing forces of light and darkness threaten to divide her kingdom." The untitled project was now being titled Spellbound, which is scheduled to open on November 11, 2022.

Critical reception
Critical response to films Jenson has directed: