Early life and education Livingston was born in
Dallas, Texas and grew up in
Los Angeles, where her family moved when she was two years old. She is the youngest of three siblings, with two older brothers. Her mother was the poet, children's book author and anthologist
Myra Cohn Livingston. Her father Richard Livingston was an accountant and author of the children's book
The Hunkendunkens. Her brother Jonas was a music executive at
Geffen Records and at
MCA Records, and directed the video for
Edie Brickell & New Bohemians' 1988 hit song
What I Am. She has another brother, Joshua. Livingston attended
Beverly Hills High School and graduated from
Yale University in 1983, where she studied photography, drawing, and painting with a minor in English Literature. One of her teachers at Yale was the photographer
Tod Papageorge. Livingston took a summer filmmaking class at
New York University in 1984.. Livingston moved to New York City in 1985, and was an activist with the AIDS activist group ACT UP. She is an out
lesbian and lives in
Brooklyn. She is
Jewish. Livingston's father died of heart disease in 1990, her mother and her grandmother both died of cancer within months of each other in 1996. Two years later, her uncle
Alan J. Pakula died in a car accident, and Livingston's brother Jonas died suddenly in early 2000. The loss of her family and her experience of grief led her to start work on her film
Earth Camp One. Paris Is Burning Livingston's documentary about a New York gay and
transgender Black and Latin
ball culture won the 1991
Sundance Grand Jury Prize. In 2016, it was included in the Film Archive at the
Library of Congress. The main speakers in
Paris is Burning include
Octavia St Laurent, Carmen Xtravaganza, Brooke Xtravaganza,
Willi Ninja,
Dorian Corey, Junior Labeija,
Venus Xtravaganza,
Freddie Pendavis,
Sol Pendavis, Kim Pendavis, and
Pepper Labeija. Jennie Livingston faced backlash from the film since she as a white filmmaker was documenting the lives of primarily Black and Latino LGBTQ+ ballroom communities, which raised concerns about representation and authorship. Some critics argued that the film profited from marginalized communities without fully compensating or crediting the participants whose stories shaped the documentary. Others also debated whether the film simplified or framed complex social issues—like race, class, and identity—in ways that made them more accessible to mainstream audiences but less accurate to lived experiences.
Subsequent works Two of Livingston's short films,
Hotheads and ''Who's the Top?
, explore queer topics. Hotheads'', a 1993 documentary created through the
AIDS research-friendly
Red Hot Organization, explores two comedians' responses to violence against women: cartoonist
Diane Dimassa, and writer/performer Reno.
Hotheads was shown on MTV and KQED and released on Polygram Video as part of Red Hot's
No Alternative compilation. ''Who's the Top?'', Livingston's first dramatic short film, premiered at
Berlin International Film Festival in 2005, and stars
Marin Hinkle,
Shelly Mars, and
Steve Buscemi. The film, a lesbian sex comedy with musical numbers, also features 24
Broadway dancers choreographed by Broadway choreographer
John Carrafa. The film screened at more than 150 film festivals on nearly every continent, including theatrical runs at
Boston's
Museum of Fine Arts and
London's
Institute of Contemporary Arts.
Through the Ice is a digital short, commissioned in 2005 for public television station
WNET-New York, about the accidental drowning of Miguel Flores in
Prospect Park, Brooklyn and about the dog-walkers who tried to save him; the film was also seen at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. In 2011, Livingston set up a
Kickstarter campaign to support her film project
Earth Camp One. A non-fiction feature-length film, it is a memoir/essay about grief, loss, and a hippie summer camp in the 1970s, also a broader exploration of how Americans view loss and impermanence, including collective political loss, and queer identity in relation to loss. Livingston first started working on the project in 2000, wanting to explore the topics of loss and grief after having lost her father, mother, grandfather, uncle, and brother between 1990 and 2000. Livingston has also been developing '''', an ensemble episodic project set in the art worlds of New York and
East Berlin in the late 1980s. In 2011, Livingston directed a video for
Elton John's show
The Million Dollar Piano at
Caesars Palace in
Las Vegas; the piece is a series of black and white moving-image portraits of a variety of New Yorkers that accompanies the song "Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters". The show ran for 7 years. Livingston has taught and lectured worldwide, including teaching courses at Yale,
Brooklyn College, and Connecticut College. Fellowships have included the
Guggenheim Foundation, the
Getty Center, the German Academic Exchange (DAAD), The
MacDowell Colony, and the
National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Since 2018, Livingston has been a consulting producer on the
FX TV drama series
Pose, which is "heavily inspired" by her documentary
Paris Is Burning. ==Filmography==