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Jessica Oreck is an American filmmaker best known for her feature documentary Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, which won the Special Jury Prize at the CineVegas International Film Festival in 2009. Her films stem from the field of ethnobiology, and study the relationship between people and environments. She is the daughter of the U.S. Ambassador to Finland, Bruce J. Oreck.

Early Life
Jessica grew up in the Bronx in New York City. She first found her inspiration to study ethnobiology, the scientific study of the relationships between people and environments, during a high school botany course. After the class watched the film series, The Private Life of Plants, by filmmaker Sir David Attenborough, Oreck said she “felt like [her] life’s path had been illuminated”.

American Natural History Museum
Oreck immediately started pursuing the interest in ethnobiological films and was hired at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. After several years of working at the museum, Oreck started working in the Butterfly Vivarium, an exhibit that houses thousands of live specimens daily. Watching people move through the exhibit and interact with the insects, as if it were a live experiment, reaffirmed her desire to create ethnobiology films. As someone who grew up in the Bronx, away from any sort of unadulterated nature, Oreck wanted her films to reach others in a similar position. In an interview with blogger Gadi Elkon, Oreck describes the following: "I make films, in part, for people like me, people who have spent their lives in cities, looking at spring buds and fall colors through dirty windows and carefully landscaped parks. I want to share the immediacy of nature – not the idealized, simplified, and anonymous version we see in nature programs on TV, but a nature populated with human characters and personal connections."

Myriapod Productions
Oreck founded her own production company, Myriapod Productions in 2008. The independent company, based in New York City, "produces original media with a focus on education and the exploration of the natural sciences, particularly within the field of ethnobiology". To date, the company has produced all of her film projects. The company's website includes details about each project, a shop to buy items related to her films, as well as an up-to-date blog about the filmmaker's status.

Film
Jessica exploded into the film world in 2009 with her first feature documentary, Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo. The widely acclaimed film focused on Japan's obsession with insects. Various elements of the culture, such as legends and poetry, were interspersed with images of daily life to give a unique insight into Japanese culture. Venus was an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival in 2011. The short was part of a series that examined the solar system. Venus in particular looked at the relationship between women, the planets, and time. Her most recent short film work, Mysteries of the Vernacular, was created in collaboration with the educational company TED-Ed. The series is composed of 26 etymological installments, one for each letter of the alphabet. While not necessarily nature-based, the work uses animation to educate—a goal that is present in all of Oreck’s work. In early 2013, Oreck released her second feature film, Aatsinki: A Story of Arctic Cowboys. The documentary followed two Finnish reindeer herder brothers over the course of a year, from the summer season where the reindeer were tracked and marked for slaughter, to the winter where the animals pulled sleighs for tourists. As in Beetle Queen, Oreck uses the documentary medium to educate the audience about a world and a lifestyle that the average person wouldn’t be exposed to. To be released later in 2014 is Oreck's third feature documentary, The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga. This film focuses on the conflicted history, nature, and fairy-tales of Eastern Europe.

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo
'Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo' won the CineVegas Special Jury Award for Artistic Vision in 2009, the Cinema Eye Spotlight Award in 2010, the Albert Maysles award in 2011, and the Eastern Oregon Film Festival award for Best Documentary in 2010. It was nominated for the Truer Than Fiction award at the Independent Spirit Award in 2010.