In her paintings, drawings, and films, Jessica Snow bridges her experiential relationship with nature, ancient art, and architecture to create works that fuse interpretation and imagination, creating a visual vocabulary that merges ancient and contemporary forms.

Jessica was born in Berkeley, CA in 1964. She continues to live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area, where received her MFA from Mills College in 1996 and her BA from UC Davis in 1987. She also attended the Sorbonne and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Currently she teaches in the art history department at University of San Francisco.

Much of Jessica’s work is informed by her travels in Asia, South America, and Europe. Her recent paintings and drawings were inspired by her travels in Greece, and her series ‘Minoan Stories’ came out of a visit to Crete. There she was inspired by the preclassical art, the geography, and the ancient myths of the island. Unfolding like an an archeological excavation, each work reveales itself in a process akin to a dive into the unknown. During a recent stay on Kephalonia she developed a technique she calls Ionian Pointillism, in which the flows of nature and mythic time inform her recent series of paintings. This summer at Cycladic Arts, an artist residency on Paros, the sea continued to play a fundamental role in her painting process.

Mythic time, or the fluidity of time, is one of the themes she explores in ‘More than Once, Upon a Time’ a film she directed in Spain and Italy with videographer Paul Morrill.  The 2023 Best Experimental Film winner in the short film category at the Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente de Madrid, the (non)narrative loops from the future to the past to the present. The film explores the sacred nature of creativity as well as divination, archeology, and the poetics of the natural world.

In 2017, while teaching art history in an international summer program at Qingdao University, Jessica made two research trips to Suzhou to study Classical Chinese gardens, calligraphy and ink-wash painting which informed her body of work 'Master of the Nets’ as well as the series ‘Borrowed Scenery’.

Jessica has had several solo shows in the Bay Area, New York, Dallas, and Southern California, including the Riverside Art Museum. She’s been in group shows at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Crocker Art Museum, Monterey Art Museum and the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art. Internationally Jessica has participated in many group shows in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Poland, Thailand, Australia, Uruguay, Argentina, Ukraine, Greece, and Spain. She is the recipient of several grants,including the Artadia grant, and she's received financial awards to attend international residency programs such as Fundación Valparaiso, Chateau Orquevaux, and the Ionian Center for the Arts. She was also a US State Dept. arts envoy to Montevideo, Uruguay. Her work is represented by Pastine Projects in San Francisco and IdeelArt in London.