Biography

Jocelyn O’Neil is an American filmmaker, producer, and curator, best known as the co-founder and former co-director of the Jim Thorpe Independent Film Festival (JTIFF), an emerging voice in the international independent film circuit.

Originally trained as a classical actress, O’Neil began her career performing Shakespeare with The Aquila Theatre Company and working in film and television in New York City. Her early work in performance, spanning theater, national commercials, and independent film, continues to inform her sensibility as a filmmaker, with a focus on character-driven storytelling and emotional precision.

In 2017, O’Neil co-founded the Jim Thorpe Independent Film Festival in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. Over the course of nearly a decade, she helped build the festival into a respected platform known for bold, carefully curated programming and for championing distinctive, risk-taking filmmakers. The festival earned strong recognition on FilmFreeway and within the broader independent film community, attracting both emerging talent and established voices.

After ten years of shaping and growing JTIFF into a festival she is deeply proud of, O’Neil stepped away to return to her own creative work. Her writing spans screenplays, plays, and poetry, with a focus on lineage, memory, and inheritance, often exploring the tension between personal history and narrative voice. She has completed a full-length poetry manuscript and continues to develop new work for publication.
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