Jessica Tucker is an American-Dutch artist, musician, and educator based in Chicago and Amsterdam. Her work playfully examines how interactions between bodies and media technologies substantiate the shifting dimensions of selfhood and thereby condition experiences of agency and identity. She creates multimedia performances, videos, and installations that restage everyday virtual activities as complex embodiments that reveal and distort our deepest desires.


Unpacking and misusing contemporary media technologies, such as social media face filters, motion capture, and 3D simulation, she poetically reframes the vane and mundane into immersive, ritual-like experiences that speak to our longing for connection while confronting dominant mechanisms of attention manipulation, self-commodification, and surveillance. Inspired by media technology histories as well as diverse spiritual and scientific definitions of consciousness and individuality, she explores cracks in machines as in humans, looking at how our shared slippages reconcile meaning in the midst of what feels like entropy.


Tucker holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she currently teaches in the Film, Video, New Media, and Animation department. She previously studied at Wellesley College, MIT, and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. She has performed and exhibited her work throughout Europe and the USA, including Rewire Festival, FOAM Museum of Photography, Goethe Institut, the Van Gogh Museum, and Mana Contemporary. She has been supported by the Chicago Artists Coalition, Thoma Foundation, Mondriaan Fund, Amsterdam Fund for the Arts (AFK), and Prins Bernhard Culture Fund. In 2023-24 she will be a Grant Wood Fellow at the University of Iowa, specializing in interdisciplinary performance using digital media.