Jenkins was born July 24, 1971, in Victorville, California, to William T. Jenkins, an Air Force captain and fighter pilot who earned a Silver Star in the Vietnam War, and Emily Roth, who worked in San Francisco as an environmental scientist. She has an older sister, Elaine Roth.\n', '

Her father died when she was 7 years old during a NATO mock dogfight in the ocean at the age of 31. Her mom decided to take her and her sister to San Francisco so that she could go to school to become an environmental scientist. Her mom dropped her off at the movies to pass the time while she was at school. This was where she fell in love with the movies. She watched the original Superman starring Christopher Reeve and after leaving that movie she saw what superheroes were designed to do, inspire the superhero within. In that moment she set a goal for herself to make a movie that left people feeling the way she felt walking out of that theater.\n', '

She spent kindergarten through her junior year of high school living in Lawrence, Kansas. She received her undergraduate degree from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1993, and her masters in directing from the American Film Institute\'s AFI Conservatory in 2000. While a student at AFI, Jenkins, an avid fan of the films of Pedro Almodóvar, made the 2001 short film Velocity Rules, that she describes as a cross between a superhero film and Almodóvar\'s tone about an accident-prone housewife.\n', '

Return to Patty Jenkins Autograph Profile