Jacqueline Goss is an experimental filmmaker whose work examines the human impulse to quantify and control even the most ineffable experiences and environments. Her films pay particular attention to people who fail in interesting ways when they get tangled up in the color and noise of the world.
Using diverse methods and tools, her work explores the ways vanity, fear, loneliness and desire seep into scientific experimentation, language, mapping, and political systems. Her projects include an animated documentary on the effects of biometric surveillance on migrants’ senses of self (Stranger Comes To Town), a film enacting the quotidian gestures of a weather observer on the windiest mountain in the world (The Observers), and a theoretical musical about Wilhelm Reich (OR119).
Over the last twenty-five years, these works and others have shown at film festivals worldwide including the London Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, the New York Film Festival, European Media Arts Festival, and Faculdade de Belas Artes. Additionally, her films and videos have screened at festivals in Melbourne, Buenos Aires,Tallinn,Taipei,Chicago, Ann Arbor, Torino and Saint Petersburg, among many others. Her moving image work has also screened at art centers, galleries, and museums including MOMA and the Natural History Museum in New York, Eyebeam Atelier, Wexner Center for the Arts, Walker Center for the Arts, Pacific Film Archive, Kunsthall Aarhus, UnionDocs, Microscope Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery, Anthology Film Archives, Arsenal, Piano Nobile, and the National Gallery in Washington, DC.
Awards for Goss’s work include the Alpert Award in Film/Video (2008), the Logue Award at the Images Festival in Toronto, best feature-length work at Migrating Forms Festival in New York, and best medium-length work at the Trento Mountain Film Festival. She has also received support for her projects from the American Philosophical Society (2023), Macdowell (2018), the LEF Foundation (2016), USA Artists Foundation (2010), New York State Council on the Arts (2010),Tribeca Film Institute/Rockefeller Foundation (2008), Creative Capital Foundation (2007), Berliner Kunstlerprogramm/DAAD (2005), the Jerome Foundation (1998), New York Foundation for the Arts (1998), and Banff Center for the Arts (1998).
Her films, videos, and animations have been written about in various journals and newspapers including The Brooklyn Rail, the New York Times, Chicago Reader, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Four Columns, Film Comment, BOMB, Art Forum, Cinemascope, Sage Journals, and Millenium Film Journal. Her films and videos are distributed by Video Data Bank in Chicago. Goss received her BA from Brown University and an MFA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She began her teaching career at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and is currently a professor in the Film and Electronic Arts program at Bard College in the Hudson Valley. She is the founder and program director of the low-power FM radio station WXTI in Tivoli, New York.