About

Photo by Jill Damatac, 2024

Born in Manila in the final years of the Marcos regime, Jill is an ex-undocumented Filipino American-raised British 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 and film work have featured in the BBC, 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 immigration 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 on May 6, 2025, and is now available for pre-order. 

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.

A queer woman who identifies as monogamously bisexual, Jill lives in London, England with her husband and their dog.