Kent Jones grew up in Berkshire County, Massachusetts before attending McGill University in the late 1970s.
He would later become a correspondent for Cahiers du Cinéma and his criticism would later be published in Bookforum, Artforum, and Cinema Scope.
[1][2] In the early 1990s, Jones worked as a video archivist for Martin Scorsese at his offices in the Brill Building.
He eventually worked on many of Scorsese's documentaries on film history, and he later co-directed several including A Letter to Elia (2010), and directed his own such as Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows (2007).
[2] He directed Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015) about François Truffaut's celebrated book on Alfred Hitchcock before making his narrative feature debut with Diane (2018).