Jessica Kallista

Jessica Kallista is an artist working in collage, video, sound, and performance. She is also an educator, curator, and gallerist. She received her MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in poetry from George Mason University in 2002. In November 2014 she founded Olly Olly, an alternative art space, in Fairfax, Virginia. Jessica has taught collage at the Corcoran School of Arts & Design GW and poetry, critical theory, aesthetics, and writing for artists at George Mason University. In summer 2020 Jessica began curating and co-moderating CVPA’s Arts in Context Kritikos Anti-Racist Reading Group. She serves on the Mason Presidential Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence (ARIE) Task Force.

Through her multi-faceted work in visual, literary, sound, and performance art, Jessica seeks to disrupt the passive nihilism intrinsic in much of everyday life by creating situations of surprise, play, pleasure, and experimentation while instigating dialogue and experience around embodiment, identity, race, sexuality, feminism, decolonization, commodity fetishism, spirituality, and inter-connectivity.

Jessica’s work has been exhibited at a variety of venues including Tempus Projects, Galerie Kritiku Prague, Rhizome, VisArts, Greater Reston Arts Center, Watergate Gallery, Target Gallery, The Torpedo Factory Art Center, The Fridge, Fenwick Gallery at George Mason University, Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery, and the Margaret W. and Joseph L. Fisher Art Gallery.

Degree:

MFA, Creative Writing, with a concentration in poetry, George Mason University, 2002

Specialist Areas:

• Aesthetics
• Critical Theory in Visual Art
• Writing for Artists