Jennifer Reeder

Jennifer Reeder (born 1971, Ohio) is an American artist, filmmaker, and screenwriter. Her short film A Million Miles Away (2014) was nominated for a Tiger Award for Short Films at the International Film Festival Rotterdam^[1] and screened at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. Short Narrative Films category.^[2][3] In 2003, she had a solo screening at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden.^[4] She received a Rockefeller Grant for New Media in 2002 and a Creative Capital grant in 2015 to support the production of her first experimental feature-length film, Knives and Skin.^[5][6] She won a 2018–19 SFFILM Rainin Grant for scriptwriting, and was the 2019 recipient of the Alpert Film Award residency at the MacDowell Colony.^[7] In 2021, she was awarded a United States Artists (USA) Fellowship.^[8]

Reeder attracted notice early in her career for her performance and video work as "White Trash Girl," a fictional identity through which the artist explored lower-income white culture in the United States.^[9] Interviewed by writer and Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis for the anthology White Trash: Race and Class in America, Reeder said that white trash "describes a certain esthetic, but I think it's also a socioeconomic situation, and a way of perceiving the world around you and your own place in the world."^[10] Her more recent films explore the lives of adolescent girls and their use of music, slang, and fashion to express their identities and aspects of their emotional world.^[11][12]

Her films have screened at the Whitney Biennial; The New York Video Festival; Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna, Austria; the Gene Siskel Film Center; the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center; the Wexner Center for the Arts; the Chicago Underground Film Festival; the Criterion Channel;^[13] and the 48th International Venice Biennial.^[14]

Reeder currently teaches in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Illinois, Chicago and holds the position of Associate Professor Moving Image.^[15][16] She is the founder of the social justice group Tracers Book Club, which focuses on feminist issues.^[17] Reeder received an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996 and was represented by the Andrew Rafacz Gallery in Chicago, Illinois.^[18]