Bio
Jessica Mumford was born in Kalamazoo, MI where she grew up dancing most of her life. While completing her BFA in Dance and Psychology at Hope College, she began looking for ways to integrate her dance and psychology knowledge together. This process lead to her current work in media art. The multi-disciplinary nature of digital media provided an excellent domain through which she could explore this fusion. After completing her BFA Jessica moved to Tempe, AZ where she is currently completing her MFA in Dance with a concentration in Arts, Media, and Engineering (AME) at Arizona State University.
Jessica's current media work and movement research utilizes knowledge from both her psychology and dance background. Her work with movement and media includes dance for camera, audio/visual installations with movement sensing, mediated objects, wearables, and dance and music performance with movement-based control of media.
In the summer of '07, Jessica completed an internship at the Information Sciences Institute in Los Angeles. During this internship Jessica worked with researcher Stacey Marsella on building new frameworks for hand and arm gesture movements in virtual humans. This work influenced Jessica to begin looking at natural forms of gesture and behavioral movement for responsive media, which she currently incorporates into her work at AME.
In efforts to bring her work to the greater Phoenix community, Jessica is working with four other interdisciplinary artists to build a non-profit organization for media art called urbanSTEW. The goal of this organization is to create, innovate, and promote media art in metro Phoenix. A component of the organization's artworks serve to innovate new technologies through the artistic process, as well as to provide open source tools for other artists to use.
While Jessica's current focus is in creating new forms of movement-based media, she also performs on a regular basis. She passionately continues to practice, perform, and participate in the contemporary dance community. During her dance career, Jessica has had the opportunity to perform with artists such as Nora Chipaumire, John Mitchell, Todd Ingalls, Mary Fitzgerald, Carley Conder, and Steven Iannacone.