Biography

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Jesse Harrod has an MFA from the department of Fiber & Material Studies from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University. She is currently the Head of Fibers & Material Studies at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia.

Jesse Harrod is an artist whose practice explores embodiment, gender, and sexual identity. Working with multiple media forms and materials, Harrod’s work builds on herstories of 1970s feminist art to offer queer imaginations of the body, from the abject and the grotesque to the humorous. Her practice most centrally contributes to a broader collective effort to redefine the meaning of queer aesthetic form. Harrod’s work has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally. These include “Tender Buttons”, Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art Project Space,  NY, “Hatch”, Bowtie Project, Los Angeles, CA, “Flaggin’ 1, 2, 3,”  Socrates Park Site Specific Commission, NY  “In Practice: Material Deviance” at the SculptureCenter in New York, the traveling exhibition “Queer Threads: Crafting Identity and Community,” “Haptic Tactics” at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York and “Even Thread Has a Speech” at the Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan WI. Harrod has been awarded residencies at The Kohler Arts and Industry, The MacDowell Artist Colony, the Banff Center for Arts and Creativity, the Museum of Art and Design, among others. Her work appears in  published edited collections such as Lenore Tawney, Mirror of the Universe, (University of Chicago Press), Queer Holdings (Hirmer Publications), a book-length catalog to accompany the exhibition “Queer Threads,” and an edited book titled Low Ropes Course (Publication Studio: Hudson) that situates Harrod’s artistic practice within a larger historical and contemporary context, with contributions from Jenni Sorkin, Daniel Orendorff, Allyson Mitchell, Laurel Sparx, Anthony Romero and JD Samson. Harrod has lectured about their work across the U.S. and internationally.