Photo courtesy of Nicole Morgenthau, all rights reserved.
Jennifer Jordan is an award-winning author, filmmaker, and screenwriter, with many years experience as a journalist, broadcast producer, radio and television news anchor, voice-over/narration talent and motivational speaker.
Jordan's second book, The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2, was released by W. W. Norton in 2010. It tells the story of Dudley Wolfe, the first man to die on K2 during the ill-fated 1939 expedition, whose remains Jordan found on the glacier below K2 base camp sixty-three years after his death. It won a 2010 National Outdoor Book Award for History/Biography and soon after publication was listed as a Best Seller in Sports books in the Wall Street Journal. She is currently negotiating an option on her screenplay of the remarkable story.
In 2005 she wrote Savage Summit: The Life and Death of the First Women of K2 (William Morrow, 2005), which won the 2005 National Outdoor Book Award for Best Mountain Literature and was selected as an Editors’ Choice by the New York Times. She also created, wrote, and co-produced the documentary Women of K2 for National Geographic, which was an official entry in scores of major film festivals, winning five.
After the release of her first book and documentary, Jordan has become a celebrated public speaker, routinely addressing audiences of all ages and backgrounds on the many issues raised in her book and films.
In 2008, she produced and wrote Kick Like a Girl, which won several international film festivals and premiered on HBO in May of 2009. She also juried the 2008 Ogden Mountain Adventure Film Festival. In 2009 she narrated and helped write the documentary Green River for KUED (PBS) in Salt Lake City. That year she also wrote on the series Hooked: The Great White for National Geographic Television. In 2010-2011 she wrote and produced Boys of Bonneville: Racing on a Ribbon of Salt, which won several major film festivals and celebrates the man who pioneered Bonneville as the "Fastest Place on Earth" over seventy years ago. Most recently, she directed, wrote, and produced Hildi: A Love Story, a short documentary on the life of the remarkable Hildi Greenson. She also was Project Director on ImagineCleanAir.Org, a competition for Utah film students to produce short docs focused on creative and imaginative solutions to the air quality problems along the Wasatch Front.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman…
Finally, and whenever possible, she works with her husband, Jeff Rhoads, a cinematographer and adventurer, on many of his television and film shoots around the world, either as his camera assistant or as a field producer.
Jeff Rhoads climbing in Utah, photo by Jennifer Jordan.
Jordan spent most of the 1990s at WGBH-FM in Boston where she anchored National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. She also worked with the acclaimed WGBH Channel 2, public television’s most prolific production house, as an on-air talent, segment producer and host, researcher and writer. Before Jordan joined WGBH she created, produced, hosted and marketed her own talk show, which she syndicated nationally via NPR’s satellite network.
She co-owns and operates Skyline Ventures Productions with Rhoads, in Salt Lake City, where she spends as much of her free time as possible exploring the back country of the Wasatch Mountains.