Skip to main content

Jill Damatac

Biography

Jill Damatac

Jill Damatac is a writer and filmmaker born in the Philippines, raised in the US and now a UK citizen, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her film and photography work has been featured on the BBC and in Time, and at film festivals worldwide. Jill holds an MSt in Creative Writing from the University of Cambridge and an MA in Documentary Film from the University of the Arts London.

Jill Damatac

Books by Jill Damatac

Dirty Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family
by Jill Damatac - Memoir, Nonfiction

Jill Damatac left the United States in 2015, first traveling to her native Philippines, Damatac eventually settled in London, England, where she was free to pursue an education at the University of Cambridge. After nine years, she was granted British citizenship, and returned to the United States, for the first time without fear of deportation or retribution. Damatac weaves together forgotten colonial history and long-buried Indigenous tradition, taking us through her time in America and cooking her way through Filipino recipes in her kitchen as she searches for a sense of self and renewed possibility. With emotional intelligence, clarity and grace DIRTY KITCHEN explores fractured memories to ask questions of identity, colonialism, immigration and belonging, and to find ways in which the ritual, tradition and comfort of food can answer them.