Jane Jerardi is a time-based artist working in the media of choreography, performance, and video. She has created work for a variety of contexts –- from theaters and galleries to record store listening booths, public subway escalators and projected videos –- constructing pieces that often move fluidly between media. A frequent collaborator, she has been fortunate to work with dance artists Ginger Wagg and Maré Hieronimus; musicians Amy Farina (of The Evens), Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud) and Lucas Zarwell; and visual artists Michael Wichita and Agata Olek, among many others, on her projects.
A recipient of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities' Artist Fellowship and a three-time recipient of its Young Emerging Artist award, her work has been presented throughout the metropolitan DC area, as well as in New York and Chicago. Her work has been presented by spaces such as the Joyce Soho, Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church, the Kumble Theater (in NY); Links Hall and Defibrillator Performance Gallery (Chicago); at Transformer, The Warehouse, Dance Place, and the Kennedy Center (in DC); as well as at the Goose Route Festival (Shepherdstown, WV), among other venues. She was among the first DC-area artists to receive an award through the Creative Communities Fund, which supported the creation of Chance, a dance-video work that appeared as a public art project at multiple sites in and around DC. Presented with Transformer, large, silent projected images appeared on the sides of buildings for single evenings so that audiences and those passing by could view them from the street.
The previous year, she received a New Media grant award from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities to complete Façade, which was presented on the upper floors of The Warehouse arts complex, with collaborators Ginger Wagg, Michael Wichita, and Rebecca Mills and Tristana Fiscella. Her work Efficiency was commissioned in 2005 by the Washington Performing Arts Society and presented at GALA's Tivoli Theatre in Washington DC. In 2004, she curated floor plan in which she and three other artists’ “choreographed miniatures” were presented as an installed performance event. Building on the success of this show, the following year, she co-presented IN SITE, a series of three multi-disciplinary performance events featuring commissions of over a dozen artists, with collaborator Ginger Wagg.
More recently, her work has employed a broader range of media -- video projections, writing, and task-based choreography, enlarging the scope of her practice. The tactile, and interactive video installation Distant required viewers to move white flour atop a drafting table in order to read handwritten text underneath. A video of an imaginary map streaming from overhead traced the coordinates of the shifting topography. Nocturne -- a durational two-hour piece -- was created for a gallery space where audiences could come and go. The remaining two-channel video installation stayed on view three weeks after the performance event.
She holds a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Performance and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she studied choreography and cultural studies.
