Jill Damatac is the author of the memoir Dirty Kitchen, publishing in 2025 with One Signal.

Born in Manila in the final years of the Marcos regime, Jill is an American-raised writer, photographer, and filmmaker. Her writing has featured in The Margins, Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s literary magazine, as well as in Longreads, Electric Lit, and Internazionale, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2021. Her photography work has featured in TIME, Eater, and Gothamist, while her short documentary film Blood + Ink (Dugo at Tinta), on legendary indigenous tattooist Apo Whang Od, is a 2017 DOC NYC Official Selection and the winner of Best Documentary 2017 at Kerry Film Festival.

Dirty Kitchen, Jill’s Filipino American memoir of family, food, and migration in the United States, “blends memoir, food writing, and history…exploring fractured memories to ask questions of what it means to belong.” Acquired by Alessandra Bastagli at One Signal, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, the memoir will publish in 2025. 

With over a decade of experience as a photographer, writer, and filmmaker, Jill holds an MA in Documentary Film from the University of the Arts London (2017) and an MSt in Creative Writing from the University of Cambridge (2021), graduating with Distinction from both programmes. She continued as a PhD student at Cambridge, earning a place despite having no undergraduate degree. At the University’s Faculty of English, she researched contemporary Filipino American fiction by women authors, examining the ways in which they aestheticized and politicized care as a response to late American capitalism and necroeconomy. Ultimately, Jill chose to leave the PhD to write her second book, a novel.

Jill also serves as a guest lecturer at the University’s Centre for Creative Writing, focusing on creative nonfiction and memoir writing. A queer woman who identifies as bisexual, Jill lives in Cambridge, England with her husband and their dog.