Jesse Harrod (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working between Philadelphia, PA, and New York, NY. Their visual art practice encompasses sculpture, painting, stop-motion animation, and other media to reimagine forms of gendered, sexual, and disabled embodiment.

Harrod’s latest solo exhibition, Tough Nut, was presented by Fleisher/Ollman Gallery in 2023. In 2021, Harrod was commissioned by the John Michael Kohler Arts Center to create a work responding to the Eugene Von Bruenchenhein collection in the center's Art Preserve. In 2020, they were awarded a Visual Arts Fellowship by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, as well as a Temple University Faculty Award for Creative Achievement.

Harrod’s solo exhibitions include Hatch, Bowtie Projects, Los Angeles, CA; Mother Mascots, Drake Hotel, Toronto, Canada; Flaggin’ 1,2,3, Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, New York; Rope, Hangaram Art Museum, Seoul, South Korea; Low Ropes Course, NurtureArt, Brooklyn, NY; and Toxic Shock and Hotdog, Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA among others. In 2019, Fleisher/Ollman presented Mending and Repair in Response, a two-person exhibition featuring Harrod and Lisi Raskin. Harrod has been featured in group exhibitions such as In Practice: Material Deviance, SculptureCenter, NY; the traveling exhibition Queer Threads: Crafting Identity and Community, organized by Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York, NY; Even Thread Has a Speech, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; and String Along at Antenna Gallery, New Orleans, LA.

Harrod has been awarded residencies at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center's Art/Industry program; Fire Island Artist Residency; the Open Studio Residency at Haystack Mountain School of Craft; the Icelandic Textile Center; the Vermont Studio Center; Ox-Bow Artist’s Residency; RAIR, Philadelphia; Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity; and the Museum of Art and Design, among others.

Harrod was born in South Africa and raised in Canada, before moving to the United States to pursue their MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Harrod has an MFA from the Department of Fiber & Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University. They are currently the Head of Fibers & Material Studies at Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia.

CV