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Jesse Garrison is an emerging Los Angeles–based video designer and multimedia artist. Currently, he is an MFA candidate at the California Institute of the Arts, studying Video for Performance with a concentration in Integrated Media. His recent stage work includes “Things That Go Bump in the Night,” a fantastical workshop piece devised with Katy Alexander and “influentialBody,” a dance piece choreographed by Andrea Gise that used accelerometers to generate auditory and visual accompaniment. He acted as Associate Video Designer on Allison Keating’s “Wald” and the Builders’ Association’s “Sontag:REBORN,” and assisted on the Builders’ “House/Divided” and CalArts’ American premiere of “When Spring Comes to Hills and Dales.” He also created several interactive applications for Switser+Knight: a heat map visualizing global online participants for a tech conference, and a wall that presented social media feeds, photos, updates and poll results for the Citi Open.

Before arriving at CalArts, Jesse was freelancing in New York, where he designed “Leave the Balcony Open” at 3LD, Sister Sylvester’s “Look Back In” at Grace Space and Sinking Ship Productions’ “On the Nature of Time,” as well as assisting with productions such as Marianne Weem’s “Emilie” at Lincoln Center, “Song of Extinction” and “Marking the Moment” with Jason Ardizzone-West. In addition to stage work, he directed music videos (such as Matt Singer’s “All This Joy” and “Conversation”), acted off- and off-off- Broadway, edited documentaries and dance videos, and sold his services as a videographer.

Currently, his work is focused on exploring the boundary of the physical and the digital and the divide between spectator and performer. He finds and develops new tools that blur, exploit, illuminate, transgress and examine these borders in the hopes that we can better understand our relationships with them, ourselves and each other.

He’s a proud member of the Builders’ Association, a Sinking Ship Productions Associate Artist and Oberlin College graduate.