Jess X. Snow

Jess X. Snow (born 1992) is a Chinese-Canadian filmmaker, muralist, public artist and poet.

Biography
Jess X. Snow's parents immigrated from Nanchang, China to Canada after the Cultural Revolution. From 2009 to 2013, Snow attended the Rhode Island School of Design and got a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film/Animation/Video and Literary Arts. Snow is received an MFA in directing at NYU Tisch School of the Arts in 2023.

Through a wide range of mediums and genres—their work re-imagines mental health, the collective unwellness of the American dream, kinships across cultures and species, and abolitionist futures. They are committed to immersing audiences in liberatory cross-cultural worlds rarely seen in cinema and literature.

Snow was named one of Filmmaker Magazine's 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2023. Their genre-bending short films unveil how flawed Asian queers live, heal and refuse with bold visuals and poetic lyricism. As a writer/director, their shorts have screened widely in university classrooms and at numerous film festivals worldwide including BlackStar, New Orleans, Ann Arbor, BFI London, Durban International Film Festival and on PBS. Their cinematography and producing credits include several narrative and documentary films shot in North America, the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, Vietnam and the Philippines supported by Sundance, ITVS, and Topic, and screening at festivals including Palm Springs and Aspen ShortsFest. They are currently in development for two narrative features, When the River Split Open, supported by 2023 Cine Qua Non Lab, and When We Were Dragons, adapted from their forthcoming novel.

A member of the Justseeds Artist Co-operative, prior to filmmaking, they spent a decade creating artwork for social movements; leading dozens of community murals on the streets of NYC, Atlanta, Bay Area, and Philadelphia. Their poetry can be found on guerrilla ad-takeovers, billboards, political posters, journals and anthologies including the forthcoming We Gathered Hear. Their books include the picture books: The Ocean Calls, the forthcoming We Always Had Wings, and the forthcoming full-length poetry collection, Remembering Our Magical Identities. In 2023, they lead a community mural honoring the abolitionist vision of Ruth Wilson Gilmore in her hometown of New Haven, CT.

Along with their artistic practice, they’ve shared their artist talks and films at hundreds of universities, high schools, conferences and organizations, and taught screenwriting and community mural-making to students of all ages and backgrounds.

Snow made their acting debut in their 2023 short film, I Wanna Become the Sky.

Currently, they are the inaugural Artist in Residence in the Asian American Studies Department at UC Santa Barbara.

Murals and installations
Featured in the LA Times, "We Always Had Wings" is a community mural project in downtown Los Angeles featuring migration of the endangered Yellow-billed cuckoo and portraits of 15 migrant girls at the Miguel Contreras Learning Complex.

"Immigration Is Transformation" was on view at Belonging: Before and After the Immigration Act of 1965 at the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience in Seattle's Chinatown until February 2016 (curated by Minh Nguyen). It is created from layers of hand-cut Japanese kozo paper, wire, and fishing line in 2015.

"O Wind, Take Me to My Country" is a mural at the Art Bar Gallery in Kingston, NY on a three-story wall for the 7th Annual O+ Festival. It features a portrait of Safia Elhillo, a Sudanese-Migrant poet.

"Ain't I A Women" is a mural finished in fall 2015 in collaboration with Jetsonorama and features portraits of poets Mahogany Browne and T'ai Freedom Ford with Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" text.

"We Be Darker Than Blue" is a mural installed at the BRIC art space in New York City and portrays two generations of black woman poets: Mahogany Browne and Sonia Sanchez, pioneer of the black arts movement. It is based on the Frida Kahlo painting "The Two Fridas."

Poetry
Snow performs and tours nationally for their poetry and spoken word, and has received recognition for it. In 2016, Snow's poem "Hunger Drives The Body into Imagination" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poem "If Cygnus Were A Refugee" was nominated for Best of the Net Anthology.
 * "The Last Words of the Honey Bees," Nepantla: Issue II
 * "Hunger Drives The Body Into Imagination,"(nominated for a Pushcart Prize), The Blueshift Journal
 * "Inheriting The Hurricane" Foundry Journal
 * "The Resistance of the Anglerfish," and "The Day I Cracked Open Heaven," The Offing
 * "The Field of Cattle" in Wildness
 * "If Cygnus Were A Refugee" (nominated for Best of the Net Anthology) "Embroidery", and "First Day of Spring" Storyscape Journal
 * "What I Saw Through The Telescope", The Margins
 * "How To Forgive 100 Years After A War," Hyphen Magazine

Performances

 * "The Inverse of You Is The Universe," SlamFind 2015
 * Ghost Town, 2012

Filmography

 * Red (2014)
 * Afterearth (2018)
 * Safe Among Stars (2019)
 * Little Sky (2021)
 * I Wanna Become the Sky (2023)