Jessica Bardsley (she/they) is an artist and scholar working across film, writing, and studio art. She is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in Film-Video. Her films have screened across the world at venues like Sundance, CPH:DOX, Visions du Réel, RIDM, True/False, and on the Criterion Channel. She is the recipient of various awards, including a Princess Grace Award, Grand Prize at 25FPS, the Eileen Maitland Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Best Short Film at Punto de Vista, and more. Her films have received support from NYSCA, If/Then Shorts, the LEF Foundation, the Points North Institute, the Harvard Film Study Center, and the Mellon Foundation. Her first feature film, The Cave Without a Name, was selected for the 2022 Venice Biennale's Cinema College. She has participated in residencies at the Bemis Center, Ox-Bow, and, currently, at The Arts Center at Governors Island through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Center.

 

Jessica Bardsley's research and writing have been supported by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies. Her 2019 article "Fluid Histories" was published in philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism and she is completing a book manuscript entitled Fluid Materiality: A Media Theory of Water in Contemporary Art. She received a Ph.D. in Film and Visual Studies from Harvard University and an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is Assistant Professor of Experimental Film and Media at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.