Jessica spent much of her childhood wandering around museums with a sketchbook, copying paintings. This pretty traditional artistic preparation took an unexpected course when she started making photographs as a teenager, but the familiar canvases of her childhood heroes -John Singer Sargent, Whistler, Vermeer- still have their influences today: she is interested in making portraits of people relating to their domestic environments and occupied with their internal worlds. Jessica uses what she finds at hand: family, friends, and more recently, babies and small children.

Jessica’s photographs have been discussed in Photo District News, Camera Austria, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and The New Yorker. Her first monograph, Interior Exposure (Damiani 2008) was selected by O: The Oprah Magazine as a top book recommendation. Her work has been widely exhibited at spaces including the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Paul Kopeikin Gallery in L.A., Cohen Amador Gallery in NYC, The Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle, and the Photographic Resource Center in Boston. She is a project competition winner at the Santa Fe Center for Photography and one of “PDN’s 30: Our Choice of Emerging Photographers to Watch”. Editorial clients include New York Magazine, O: The Oprah Magazine, Real Simple and Newsweek.

A New York Photo Festival 2008 award winner, a 2008 Lucie award winner, and a 2009 recipient of a PA Council for the Arts Grant, Jessica has been invited to talk about her work at such places as The International Center for Photography, NYC; Google Headquarters, Palo Alto, CA; and Aperture Gallery, New York. She teaches at Swarthmore College.