Jennifer Prediger ’00
Telling meaningful stories
By Kiera O’Brien ’18
Jennifer Prediger ’00 appreciates the art of the unexpected conversation. “As a student, if I ever felt uncertain where my path in human ecology would take me, I’d reassure myself that at very least a degree in human ecology would make me good at dinner party conversation. You never know where a conversation will take you.” Her vibrant career as an independent filmmaker and actor has proved her point. In 2016, while at a dinner party in Hollywood, Prediger was introduced to Wyatt McDill, a fellow writer and director. The two hit it off, and, inspired by their animated discussion about the power of storytelling over cocktails, McDill wrote a screenplay “about a woman who yearns to tell meaningful stories,” Prediger says. As soon as the script was finished, he asked Prediger to play the lead.
The film, Hollywood Fringe (2020), is the latest in Prediger’s eclectic indie oeuvre. Although she has acted in dozens of films and TV series, she is also a screenwriter and director in her own right. Her directorial and screenwriting debut feature, Apartment Troubles, premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival in 2014. Other projects she has written, directed, produced, or performed in have played in major festivals around the world including Sundance, SXSW, Tribeca, and the Toronto International Film Festival.
Although there weren’t many formal film courses when Prediger was a student, her filmmaking journey began with COA and human ecology. “Independent filmmaking has felt like a natural progression of creating your own path at COA,” she says. “I think movies are a way to make sense of the world, and I think human ecology is a way to make sense of the world.”
COA’s multidisciplinary focus is especially relevant. “As a filmmaker, you’re thinking in a lot of different dimensions all at once, and it’s this collaborative art form where you’re incorporating music and set design and acting and writing. All of these elements are separate, but are being unified in the context of your film. Nothing could prepare you for that quite as well as an education that’s human ecological.”
Prediger warmly remembers “taking every class [writing professor emeritus] Bill Carpenter ever taught,” but it wasn’t always clear that film and writing were her calling. “Writing was always of interest to me, but I also thought, Maybe I’m going to be an environmental scientist,” she recalls. Her moment of clarity arrived not while watching a film with friends in Turrets—a favorite pastime—but scribbling field notes on the rocky and wind-beaten shores of Petit Manan.
“I was working for [William H. Drury, Jr. Chair in Ecology and Natural History] John Anderson’s program, living in the lighthouse monitoring seabird behavior,” says Prediger. “We were supposed to take notes and write down every time a bird fed or pooped or did whatever seabirds do. Instead, I sat there all day writing poetry in my scientific journal! That’s when I realized I was a terrible scientist.” Laughing, Prediger expands: “The poetry of it was the thing that excited me. That island is the most poetic place you could ever be—it’s electric.”
Prediger’s only regret about her time at COA is that she didn’t overlap with performance art and film professor [T.A. Cox Chair in Studio Arts] Nancy Andrews as a student. Andrews, she says, “is the most delightful person. A brilliant and singular visionary.” When Andrews approached Prediger to play a role in her 2015 film The Strange Eyes of Dr. Myes, she enthusiastically agreed. Prediger gushes about her time on set: “The whole thing was so much fun! Nancy is a true badass.”
These days, Prediger balances filmmaking with a newly discovered passion—teaching. She serves as a lecturer in film at the CalState schools, where she feels fully “immersed in helping other people tell stories and find avenues to tell new stories.” When I ask her what she loves most about teaching her craft, she pauses for a moment. “Having to articulate with my students what needs to happen for a story to work and feel meaningful. Watching their creative processes grow inspires my own.” Teaching becomes its own kind of conversation.
