Upon taking over from the outgoing director, John Cooper, last February — a promotion that made her both the first woman and the first person of color to head Sundance — Jackson said she wondered what she could bring to the world’s most venerated independent-film festival. “I was looking at an incredible, almost 40-year-old machine,” she said in an interview, “and thinking, ‘What is my role going to be in taking this forward?’”

Just one month later, it was clear that Jackson’s inaugural year would be anything but typical. In March, the fast-growing Covid-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of the South by Southwest festival mere days before the event was supposed to take place. Movie theaters across the country were soon shuttered, and some of the most talked-about titles to come out of Sundance 2020, like the raucous comedy “Zola,” were pulled from the calendar and still have no release date.

By June, Jackson knew she would have to plan for a Sundance that would play out primarily on the internet. “The core of the festival being digital just seemed necessary for our public health and for our sanity, so we could have some certainty of what we were planning for,” she said. And much to the programmers’ surprise, the flood of submissions mostly kept pace with the previous year.