Joel DeMott

Joel "Jo" Heyward DeMott (April 22, 1947 – June 13, 2025) was an American documentary film director. She is known for the independent cinéma vérité films she made in collaboration with Jeff Kreines, Seventeen and Demon Lover Diary.

Life and career Early life DeMott was born on April 22, 1947, in Washington, DC, and raised in Amherst, Massachusetts. She attended public school in Amherst before attending an English school in Portugal for a "happy year" and what she described as a "girls’ cloister in Northampton" for "three miserable years".

Kreines was hired by factory worker and first-time director Donald G. Jackson as cameraman for his feature The Demon Lover (1976), a low budget horror film which would shoot in Michigan. Kreines and DeMott drove to Michigan, and DeMott documented the journey and production in her second film Demon Lover Diary, which was released in 1980. The film was praised by critics and won the 1980 Los Angeles Film Critics Association’s Independent/Experimental Film and Video Award, sharing the prize with Journeys From Berlin by Yvonne Rainer, a category which was introduced that year. DeMott assisted her father, Benjamin DeMott, with research for three books.

Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus put Demon Lover Diary on a list of the best documentaries of all time for the 1997 International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. Goldbug Street (2027)

Only Demon Lover Diary and Seventeen are publicly available, with Goldbug Street scheduled for a 2027 release.

Cinematographer The Energy War (1979) Depeche Mode 101 (1989)