About the Artist

Jen Hernandez

Jen Hernandez is an artist, educator and community organizer with over 18 years of experience in all-ages arts education. Her art and education work focuses on imaging the world through stories, represented with visual art, through embodied expression and by storytelling and writing. As an illustrator, Jen’s work explores how story and meaning are expressed through linework and gestural drawing, re-imagining folklore and visual cultures as a practice to honor lived experiences and visualize future folklore. Jen is also a bookmaker who encourages crafters to design sketchbooks and journals as personal spaces to explore and aid the work of reality-crafting. To create visual artwork and stories, Jen uses mixed media illustration with colored pencil, ink, and watercolor, as well as digital media drawing and crafting on online interactive environments. Jen also works in fiber arts with embroidery, knitting, crochet and sewing, to create objects of fascination, comfort, and play for all. Her influences are the crafted worlds of Ross Gay, Octavia E Butler, Ruth Ozeki, Ursula K le Guin, Bob Ross, Alfons Mucha, Frida Kahlo; and the revealed natural world of forests: slugs, mycology, corvidology, trees and starburst skies of the Pacific Northwest. Jen is currently, as she is at all times, in a process of learning and re-learning radical pedagogy practices through arts from authors such as Paulo Freire, Augusto Boal, bell hooks, Felicia Rose Chavez, adrienne maree brown, and Vea Vecchi among others, as well as learning from students and other educators in living communities and singular moments both. This practice includes holding spaces for story-gifting, embodiment using theatre games a’la Theatre of the Oppressed, reflection and accountability. As well as a life-long artist and storycrafter, Jen has been a fast food and retail worker, early childhood educator, museum educator, social worker and remains to this day a voracious reader with an appetite for curiosity of science, history, fantasy and speculation. As a young child in the 90’s, Jen was enamored with animation, film and fashion, all of which both clarified and complicated her worldview and sense of self. In her visual art and educational practices, Jen is keen on creating access to different ways of imagining and imaging the world, and to discover and protect space for all artists and explorers. Jen Hernandez has professional and educational background in early childhood education, a Bachelor of Arts in History of Art and Visual Culture from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and completed Master’s work at the University of Oregon on Arts Administration and Museum Studies. She often wanders the Pacific Northwest and always comes home to the screeching calls of her black cat, Dyna.