"Jacinta" director.
She is a documentary photographer and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work focuses on criminal justice and healthcare. Her photography has appeared in National Geographic, The Marshall Project, Mother Jones Magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR, amongst others. In 2015, she received the prestigious Rita and Alex Hillman Foundation Fellowship & Grant to photograph aging in American prisons. During this project, she received unique unrestricted access in Maine State prisons. In 2016, her Aging in Prison work received an honorable mention by FotoVisura Grant, was published in National Geographic, Huffington Post and PDN Magazine, and named one of the most interesting photo essays of the week by Buzzfeed. In 2017, the next chapter of her aging in prison work, centering on re-entry after a life sentence, was published in Mother Jones and The Marshall Project. In 2018, she photographed and shot video for an NPR story called “In Iowa, A Commitment To Make Prison Work Better For Women,” which was apart of a special series covering discipline and women in prison, and specifically looked at gender-responsive corrections at a women’s prison in Iowa.
Jessica is a graduate of the International Center of Photography's photojournalism program (New York, NY), and later worked as a junior photo editor at TIME Magazine. Prior to this, she studied documentary filmmaking at The Gulf Islands Film & Television School (British Columbia, Canada), and Film Production at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). This past spring she won the Albert Maysles Best New Documentary Director Award at the Tribeca Film Festival for her first feature film, JACINTA. She was also recently selected for Doc NYC’s 40 under 40 list. jessicaearnshaw.com
