Patricia Lea Jenkins (born July 24, 1971) is an American film and television director and screenwriter. She directed the films Monster (2003), Wonder Woman (2017), and the upcoming Wonder Woman 1984 (2020). For her work on the pilot episode of The Killing, she received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series and won the Directors Guild of America award for Outstanding Directing in Dramatic Series.
Jenkins was born in Victorville, California, to William T. Jenkins, an Air Force captain and fighter pilot who earned a Silver Star in the Vietnam War, and Emily Roth, who worked in San Francisco as an environmental scientist. She has an older sister, Elaine Roth.
When Jenkins was 7, her father died during a NATO mock dogfight at the age of 31. Her mother then took her and her sister to San Francisco so that Jenkins could go to school to become an environmental scientist. There, Jenkins said in 2017, seeing the original Superman starring Christopher Reeve inspired her to pursue film as a career.