Jessica Zi Chen is a PhD student in Art History and concurrently completing a certificate in Film and Media Studies. Her work centers on contemporary experimental film, moving image practices, performance, and elemental media. Drawing on ecocritical theory, Indigenous knowledge systems, archipelagic thinking, and un-master aesthetics, she analyzes how artistic practices in the Global South engage the structural conditions of environmental degradation, including extractive capitalism, settler colonialism, geopolitical violence, and resource driven imperialism. Her research investigates how artists articulate, negotiate, and reimagine the tensions between situated knowledge and environmental criticality within transnational contexts.

 

Jessica holds an MA in Modern and Contemporary Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in History of Art and Architecture and French Studies from Boston University. She has presented her work at the Association for Art History Annual Conference in the United Kingdom, the University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, among other venues. Her broader practice includes community building and curatorial experimentation. She is a co-founder of Working Title, an initiative that connects scholars and artists across institutions and supports cross institutional exchanges within and beyond the Chicago art community. Jessica has been a resident writer at Muña Chuquimarca and a member of the Queer Ecologies Collective at Mildred’s Lane New York, experiences that continue to inform her interest in expanded artistic practice and environmental inquiry.