Jessica (Jess) Bal (she/her) is a documentary photographer and PhD student in Art History at The Graduate Center at CUNY. She is especially interested in images as artifacts of systemic power and the ethics of collaboration and immersion.
Jess has taught media literacy and visual storytelling to teens and graduate students in New York City, coordinated education programming for the Photoville festival, and managed the digital archive of renowned photographer Susan Meiselas. Her documentary work has been supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation, Magnum Foundation, The Polis Project, UnionDocs, Eddie Adams Workshop, and Fledgling Fund, and published in The New York Times, BuzzFeed News, VICE, The Miami Herald, Narratively, and others.
Jess received a B.A. in Art History and English from Tufts University and an M.A. in Journalism at CUNY.