Jacob Kessler

Jacob Kessler is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and educator based in New York City. Drawing from ethnography and experimental cinema, his films emerge through intimate collaborations with participants and emphasize the tactile materiality of 16mm film to explore intersubjective and sensorial experience. Jacob’s work has screened in festivals and cinemas across the globe including CUFF (Chicago), Mimesis (Boulder), LUFF (Lausanne), Academic Film Center (Belgrade), La Lumière Collective (Montreal), Baltic Analog Lab (Riga), Spectacle (NYC), Doc Films (Chicago), NoBudge (streaming), and more. His latest film Radio Jammer, a portrait of Chicago’s underground rap scene, was awarded the Jury Prize at Grain Urbain (Paris) and Best in Show at ICDOCS (Iowa City). He is currently co-directing One Long Arm Blind, a feature-length documentary examining the history and ecology of Chicago’s Bubbly Creek. Jacob previously taught at the University of Iowa as Assistant Professor of Instruction and served as Programming Director for the Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival. He holds an MFA in Documentary Media with a Certificate in Critical Theory from Northwestern University.