Jane Jerardi is a performer, choreographer, and artist. She has created work for a variety of contexts –- from theaters and galleries to record store listening booths, public subway escalators and projected videos –- creating work that often moves fluidly between media. A frequent collaborator, she's created work with a host of artists including 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 others.
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 -- including at Transformer, The Warehouse, Dance Place, and the Kennedy Center -- as well as in New York at the Joyce Soho and at Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church, and at the Goose Route Festival, in Shepherdstown WV, among other venues. In fall 2009, she will relocate to Brooklyn, NY to pursue an MFA in New Media and Performance at Long Island University/Brooklyn.
In 2007, 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 where audiences could view it 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 collaobrators Ginger Wagg, Michael Wichita, and Rebecca Mills and Tristana Fiscella of The Caution Curves. 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 performed within “arm’s reach of the audience” (Washington Post). 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.
Jerardi has taught as a guest artist at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia; at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana; at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA; and currently teaches yoga to adults. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she studied choreography and cultural studies.
"Jerardi's talent is well established within dance circle; her perfectly capable video installation proves her merits in other genres as well." -- Kriston Capps, Washington Post's Express
