About / Contact

Jo Dery is an interdisciplinary artist who experiments with storytelling. Her works include animated films and videos, drawings, prints, illustration, installation projects, and artist/small-press book publications. Through the playful invention of characters and events, she investigates our relationship to natural phenomena, the built environment, history and current events, as well as aspects of cognition and consciousness.

Her animations have screened at festivals nationally and internationally, including the Ann Arbor Film Festival and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. She has been awarded grants for her film/video work from the LEF Foundation, the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, and The Free History Project. She has exhibited her drawings and prints in Providence, New York, San Francisco, Portland, and Los Angeles. Her books can be found in independent stores like Ada Books (Providence) and Quimby’s (Chicago), or purchased online from Little Otsu. She has completed residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, as well as participated in an animation workshop at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, Poland. Most recently, she designed an installation project for the DeCordova Museum Biennial, at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Massachusetts. 

She holds a BFA in Film/Animation/Video from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College. In 2011, she relocated from Providence, RI, to Chicago, IL, where she is currently an Assistant Professor of Animation in DePaul University’s School of Cinema and Interactive Media.

Contact: johannadery@gmail.com