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Jenny Gilbertson (born Jenny Brown; 28 October 1902 – 8 January 1990) was a Scottish documentary and educational filmmaker.
Gilbertson chose Shetland as her first subject as she had been taken there by her family as a child. Gilbertson met native Shetlander farmer Johnny Gilbertson while filming one of her earlier films, Rugged Island: A Shetland Lyric (1933), where Gilbertson played the lead in the story-documentary film. They married shortly after the completion of the film, in 1934. She experienced a halt in her filmmaking career until the 1960s, due to the birth of her and her husbands two daughters, the distant location of Shetland, and World War II. It was not until after retiring from a teacher position that she entered her second phase of filmmaking.
During her hiatus after the lecture tours, the Gilbertsons ran a small hosiery business in their hometown of Shetland in the 1940s. Later in 1947 Jenny Gilbertson accepted a temporary teaching position at the local Urafirth Primary School, which turned her supposed temporary employment into two decades. However, she revisited filmmaking after retiring from teaching in 1967, and returned to Canada soon after, where she made films for the Canadian Broadcasting Company. The revival of her filmmaking career was largely due to her husband's sudden death earlier in the year. Ideally returning to filmmaking in the 1970s, Gilbertson spent vast lengths of time in Arctic Canada producing some of her last works. People of Many Lands, Jenny's Arctic Diary: Part I and II, and Walrus Hunt were some of her later films that were sold to British and Canadian broadcasters, including the Canadian Museum of History. She also made a further film about Shetland, People of Many Lands- Shetland with Elizabeth Balneaves, which was broadcast by the BBC in October 1967.
All the films Gilbertson had made during her filmmaking career were focused on embracing nature, farming life, fishing, families that did such activities and anything that captured the environment she was in.
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In November 2022 Banks' work featured in the GLEAN exhibition at Edinburgh's City Art Centre of 14 early women photographers working in Scotland. The photographs and films that were curated by Jenny Brownrigg were by Gilbertson, Helen Biggar, Violet Banks, Christina Broom, M.E.M. Donaldson, Dr Beatrice Garvie, Isabel Frances Grant, Ruby Grierson, Marion Grierson, Isobel Wylie Hutchison, Johanna Kissling, Isabell Burton-MacKenzie, Margaret Fay Shaw and Margaret Watkins
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