Community-Engaged Artistic Practice
I began my career in outreach, arts education and community development before training as an artist. As a result, my artistic work has always involved community engagement. A huge part of my work (in my creative work and community engagement), focuses on authorship and the lens through which we see a story.
boof
boof is my latest project – a mockumentary web-series about a 2000s celebrity heiress turned wellness influencer. This series is about women’s healthcare, visibility, and friendship. This project also happens to be made by an all female, all-chronically-ill core team. We want to share how we are making the work in an access-led way.
Alongside this project I am platforming some workshops, free resources, and am sharing posts on the boof production diary.
WIP IT Good is a sustainable, peer-led group that allows artists to develop, rehearse, feedback, and platform solo work, collaboratively. This project creates support, protected time, shared resources, and external accountability for working artists.
In 2019, I read an article in the Guardian about Imposter Syndrome being a class problem, and it really rang true to my experience as a queer working woman. I struggle with Imposter Syndrome and I know I’m not the only one. I started the Imposter Project in 2020 because I want to encourage other people like me to also push through their greatest internal obstacles to keep going and make art. It’s where I create free resources for other artists, write about the themes of the original work I make, and I reflect on the creative process.
resources: heal creative wounds
Healing Creative Wounds A very wise friend of mine recently
blog: welcome to boof
Welcome to boof, Jessica’s Version It’s 2016. Bella – a
resources: celebrate
resources: celebrate attempts, failures, & yourself If you are out
Pieces Of Us
Alongside my solo show, Offie-nominated & critically acclaimed Pieces of US, about grief and the broken promises of The American Dream, I wrote extensively about my own relationship with grief in The Imposter Newsletter. I closed the final run of the show with a few short free talks with a Death Doula and made them publicly available.
The Poetry Podcast
Since late 2019, I’ve been recording and releasing audio performances of poetry and prose in the public domain, creating ambient soundscapes and music behind it. In 2021, I worked with the Crystal Palace Arts Festival running workshops for young people interested in podcasts. We discussed poetry, recording techniques, and community. I invited interested participants to help me make an episode. This is what we came up with.
SHAWCO | South Africa
As a 2012 Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar, I worked with SHAWCO to facilitate an after-school series about creativity, creative authorship, and facilitated a 1-year pen-pal program between a group of South African high school students and students from my home high school in the USA. I raised funds for disposable cameras for the students to photograph their community, ran a few workshops encouraging them to make posters, music compilations, and letters about their culture, as well as taking photo portraits of each student. I donated the portraits to SHAWCO to use to promote their good work. I only make these photographs available for portfolio purposes.
I spent a lot of 2009 working with the Baan Unrak orphanage, refining and touring with the children’s show (which they performed to raise money for the orphanage), teaching English through music, directing the orphanage’s new break-dancing group, I also took photographs of the woven clothes, bags, and dolls (seen here) to use on the Baan Unrak website to sell products for the weaving center. These photos are only available for portfolio purposes.
