Jennifer Kaytin Robinson

Jennifer Kaytin Robinson is a writer and director who came up through television before making a clear pivot toward feature films — a trajectory that's become increasingly common for creatives who cut their teeth in the streaming era. Born in Miami, Florida on April 4, 1988, she began building her reputation as a voice in youth-oriented drama, developing a sensibility that sits somewhere between genre entertainment and character-driven storytelling. She's probably best known, at least until recently, for her work creating the MTV series Sweet/Vicious, which ran in 2016 and centered on two college students who take vigilante action against campus sexual assault — not exactly light material for a network that built its brand on reality TV and music videos.

Sweet/Vicious is where Robinson's instincts as a storyteller came into focus. The show didn't shy away from the emotional weight of its premise, and what's striking is how it managed to hold dark subject matter alongside genuine comedic energy without the two elements canceling each other out. That's a harder balance to pull off than it looks. The series was canceled after one season, which frustrated a lot of viewers who had connected with it — and honestly, it's the kind of show that probably deserved more runway than it got. Still, it established Robinson as someone willing to work in genre spaces while keeping the human stakes front and center.

Her feature work has leaned into that same instinct for genre with emotional underpinning. She co-wrote Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) with Taika Waititi, a film that — whatever you think of its tonal swings — was attempting something genuinely strange for a Marvel blockbuster, mixing grief and cosmic absurdity in ways that divided audiences and critics pretty sharply. Robinson also wrote and directed Someone Great (2019) for Netflix, a romantic comedy that used the structure of a breakup to examine female friendship with more specificity than the genre usually allows. The film starred Gina Rodriguez, and it's the kind of Netflix original that tends to get undersold in the algorithm but finds its audience through word of mouth over time.

Her collaborations suggest a consistent interest in working with filmmakers and performers who share her appetite for mixing tones — Waititi being the obvious example, but also the producers and networks willing to let her operate in spaces where comedy and real emotional pain coexist. That thread runs from Sweet/Vicious through Someone Great and into her more recent work. She doesn't seem particularly interested in making things comfortable.

Which brings us to I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025), the feature Robinson directed that represents her biggest studio assignment to date. The film is a revival of the late-nineties slasher franchise — the original 1997 film, based on Lois Duncan's novel and scripted by Kevin Williamson, was very much a product of its cultural moment, riding the wave that Scream had kicked off the previous year. Hard to say if Robinson is approaching this as straight genre revival or using the horror scaffolding to do something more pointed, but given her track record, it's probably not purely a nostalgia exercise. Variety reported that the project was in development with Sony Pictures, and it marks a significant step in terms of scale and visibility for Robinson as a director. Whether the film lands as a genuine reexamination of the source material or as a competent franchise entry, it positions her squarely in the conversation around who gets handed major studio horror properties.

Robinson's career so far has been built on a kind of productive restlessness — TV, Netflix originals, Marvel co-writes, and now legacy horror. Not a single lane. That can work against a filmmaker trying to establish a signature, but it can also mean someone who's genuinely hard to categorize, which, in a market that tends to flatten everything into brand identity, isn't nothing.