JACQUELINE CASTEL is an internationally award-winning director, screenwriter, and curator based in NYC. As an artist, she explores the connection between occultism, surrealism, eroticism, and genre cinema in her storytelling. Her debut feature film MY ANIMAL premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2023 and is being distributed by Paramount Pictures. 

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Castel's work has been featured at more than fifty festivals worldwide, including Sundance, SXSW, Rotterdam, Outfest, Sitges, and Fantasia. She has written for and directed cult auteurs John Carpenter and Jim Jarmusch, and collaborated on a film with David Lynch for his Festival of Disruption in 2018. Her most recent short film released in 2021 is a portrait of Cannes award-winning actor Caleb Landry Jones. Castel’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The BBC, NOWNESS, VICE, Italian Vogue, Interview Magazine, and on AMC's Shudder.

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With the support of the Tate Britain in London, she is currently in production directing the feature documentary A MESSAGE FROM THE TEMPLE, about UK artist and ritual sex magick collective Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth, featuring British artist, musician, and cultural provocateur Genesis P-Orridge.

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Castel is attached to direct French-Japanese erotic thriller EDGES OF THE FLESH from a script co-written by her and Sasha Grey, a feature which Castel will be directing in Tokyo. Her first feature screenplay, psychological horror film MIHARA, was the recipient of the Ivanhoe Pictures Award at the IFFAM Project Market in Macao, China in 2017 for its merit as an international co-production and is currently in development. In 2019 she began development on a series adaptation of OCCULT AMERICA, based on the acclaimed book by writer and historian Mitch Horowitz. 

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Her screenwriting work includes DARLING, a screenplay adaptation of Iris Owens' first novel, depicting her life in 1950s Paris as one of the Olympia Press's leading female pornographers. Castel was additionally a co-writer a screenplay starring Bella Thorne. 

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Castel was previously a co-director at the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies in New York, and is a freelance programmer and artistic director for events, experiences, and screenings internationally, including most recently at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn (2022) and a multi-media presentation with British surrealist Penny Slinger at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles (2019). She has created live projections for engagements at the Guggenheim and MoMA P.S.1, and events for VICE and BOUND NYC. Her photography work has been showcased at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and as part of Tony Oursler’s Eclipse installation at the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris.

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She earned her Film & TV BFA with Honors at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and did additional coursework in film programs at the Academy of Performing Arts FAMU in the Czech Republic and at CalArts in Southern California.

She is a triple citizen of the United States, France, and Canada and hails from Reno, Nevada.

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