Jeremy Jacob’s work is an expansive, interdisciplinary investigation into memory, narrative, and material transformation. They construct visual and performative worlds that blend handcrafted paper objects, altered books, film, design, and multimedia environments. At the core of their practice is a deep engagement with material storytelling — physically deconstructing and reassembling found texts and images to reveal new, often poetic narratives that reflect on personal and collective experience. This approach creates work that feels both intimate and uncanny, inviting viewers into spaces where the familiar becomes strange and new connections emerge.

Projects like My Town highlight Jacob’s ability to merge visual design with performance and narrative, producing atmospheric, dream-like spaces that resonate with emotional and psychological depth. In My Town, for example, their scenic, sound, costume, and video designs work in concert to amplify themes of memory, identity, and place within a queer reimagining of small-town American mythologies.

Jeremy Jacob’s work operates at the threshold between handmade materiality and mediated image-making, exploring how internal experiences — dreams, stories, histories, losses — can be externalized, shared, and read.

Jeremy Jacob (b. 1985, Albany, Minnesota) lives and works in the Hudson Valley of New York. Their work examines mourning and desire—how we touch, or fail to touch, a world that can feel distant or unreachable. Centered on hand-crafted paper objects, Jacob’s practice treats paper as both material and metaphor: fragile, intimate, and resistant to permanence. Books are cut, dismantled, and rebuilt, forming environments that hover between construction and collapse, intimacy and exposure.

This paper world is activated through photographic and cinematic processes, creating spaces where contradictions in perception come to the surface. Jacob’s work moves between work and play, childhood and adulthood, private making and public display, attending to the tension between what is found and what is created. Through acts of transformation, interior and isolated worlds are externalized—made tangible, legible, and available to be read by others.

Jacob’s practice is shaped by a long lineage of writers and thinkers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, St. Augustine, and Walt Disney, whose reflections on solitude, imagination, and the human condition echo throughout the work. Engaging language as both object and experience, Jacob’s work asks whether inner life can ever be fully translated—and whether art might serve as a means of connection, a way of proving the world’s existence through shared attention and care.

Jeremy Jacob’s work has been presented by The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Palazzo Grassi, Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), Fisher Center at Bard, The Zuckerman Museum of Art, Cindy Rucker Gallery, DANCECleveland, Projekt 722, Montserrat College Of Art, New York Live Arts, American Ballet Theatre, Dance On Camera Festival, The New York Public Library, among others. 

Co-Host of the Dance and Stuff podcast.

Founding Director of A Doll’s House Pictures

Board Member of the New York Odyssey Film Festival.

FELLOWSHIPS, AWARDS, RESIDENCIES, and SCREENINGS

2024. Dance Division Anniversary Fellow. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. New York, New York. // 2024. Jurist for the San Francisco Dance Film Festival. San Francisco, California. // 2024. Nominating Committee Member for the New York Odyssey Film Festival. New York, New York. // 2024. Cannes of Tuna Film Festival. “Dirt(y) Bag”. Zebulon. Los Angeles, California. // 2024. The Carr Center for Human Rights / Harvard Kennedy School. ”Nowhere Apparent”. Screening. Cambridge, Massachusetts. // 2023. Jurist for the New York Odyssey Film Festival. New York, New York. // 2023. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.”Nowhere Apparent”. Screening & Discussion. New York, New York. // 2023. The Watermill Center Residency. Watermill, New York. // 2023. Dance on Camera Festival. “I was waiting for the echo of a better day”. Screening. New York, New York. // 2023. ALL ARTS. “Nowhere Apparent”. Film Release.   // 2022. Bard College. “I was waiting for the echo of a better day”. Screening & Discussion. New York, New York. // 2022. Guggenheim Works & Process and Modern Accord Depot Residency. Accord, New York. // 2021. Palazzo Grassi. La Biennale di Venezia. “I was waiting for the echo of a better day”. Screenings. New York,  New York. // 2021. Palazzo Grassi. La Biennale di Venezia. “David”. Screening. New York, New York. // 2021. Palazzo Grassi. La Biennale di Venezia. “Dancing The Studio” with Pam Tanowitz. Performance. New York, New York. // 2020. American Ballet Theatre. “David”. Film Release. // 2020. Guggenheim Works & Process. “Good Night”. Film Release. // 2020. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Researching the AIDS Oral History Project. // 2020. “Three Deaths”. Sundance Film Festival Official Selection. Production Design by Jeremy Jacob.

EXHIBITION, FILMS, & OTHER PROEJCTS

“Veronica, Veronica." Group Exhibition. Hesse Flatow. Curated by Andrew Gardner and Emma Safir. 2025.

“Everything Is True”. Documentary Film. Direction, Editing, Sound Editing, Title Designs, and Co-Produced by Jeremy Jacob. Created with Pam Tanowitz. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. New York, New York. 2020.

“Good Night”. Short Film. Direction, Director of Photography, Editing, Sound & Music, Special Effects, Production Design and Co-Written by Jeremy Jacob. Presented by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. New York, New York

“David”. Short Film. Concept, Direction, Editing, Sound & Music, Production Design, and Produced by Jeremy Jacob. Presented by American Ballet Theatre. New York, New York // 2020

“Nowhere Apparent”. Documentary & Performance Lecture. Direction, Co-Written, Photography, Editing, Sound & Music, and Produced by Jeremy Jacob. Created in collaboration with Jack Ferver. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. New York, New York // 2022

“Finally Unfinished”. Virtual Web Design. Designed by Jeremy Jacob. Presented in Collaboration with Pam Tanowitz at The Joyce Theater. New York, New York // 2020

“Not The Child”. Music Video. Concept, Direction, Editing, Production Design, Special Effects, Paper Animations, and Produced by Jeremy Jacob. For Chris Garneau. Hudson, New York

“Now On”. Music Video. Concept, Direction, Editing, Production Design, Special Effects, Paper Animations, and Produced by Jeremy Jacob. For Chris Garneau. Hudson, New York

“Talk, Talk”. Short Film. Designs for Screen, Editing, Compositing, Sound & Music, Title Designs, and Produced by Jeremy Jacob. Presented by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. New York, New York

“Paramodernities Live”. Six-Part Livestream Presentation. Production Design, Editing, Sound Design, Livestream Direction and Produced by Jeremy Jacob. Presented by Netta Yerushalmy and Princeton University. Princeton, New Jersey

“State of Desire”. Film. Direction, Photography, Editing, Production Design, Sound & Music, Costume Design, Special Effects/Animation, and Written by Jeremy Jacob. Brooklyn, New York and Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

“Dear Merce”. Short Film. Direction, Production Design, Editing, Sound & Music, Co-Written, and Produced by Jeremy Jacob. With Netta Yerushalmy. Presented by The New York Public Library. “Made At NYPL”. Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Rayner Special Collections Wing and Print Gallery

“Desire”. A Play. Production Design and Costume Design by Jeremy Jacob. Directed by Jack Ferver. Fisher Center at Bard. Annandale-On-Hudson, New York.

Everything Is Imaginable”. A Play. Production Design and Sound Design by Jeremy Jacob. Directed by Jack Ferver. New York Live Arts. New York, New York // 2016  

“Winter: My Secret”. Group Exhibition: Jenn Dierdorf, Brad Parsons, and Jeremy Jacob. Cindy Rucker Gallery. New York, New York

PODCAST

“Dance And Stuff”. Weekly Podcast. Co-Created, Edited and Produced by Jeremy Jacob. With Reid Bartelme and Jack Ferver.

PRESS

2020. Vanity Fair. “A Few Things That Actually Went Right in 2020” //  2020. Fjord Review. “ABT Rising” // 2020. The New York Times. “At Ballet Theater, New Videos and Signs of a New Era // 2020. The Wall Street Journal. “For Screen, Not Stage” // 2020. KEXP. “Chris Garneau Is Liberated From the Weight of the Past With "Not the Child"” // 2020. The New York Times. “Candid Talk on Cunningham’s Company” // 2020. American Songwriter. “Chris Garneau Unearths Trauma and Triumph on Fifth Album ‘The Kind,’ Reveals First Story ‘Not the Child’" // 2020. Paris Review. “Sex Work, Cigarettes, and Systemic Change” // 2020. The Wall Street Journal. “The Staying Inside Guide: Out of the Rotunda, Onto the Internet” // 2020. The New York Times. “Where Dance Fans Can Escape From Our ‘Sci-Fi Horror’ Moment” // 2018. The New York Times. “Dancing Their Friends and Heroes (and My Little Pony)”.

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