Jessica Miller began taking pictures at a young age, and has always been fascinated with images that tell stories.
As a teenager, she photographed people living with AIDS in Virginia, and displayed these images in high school fairs. Her interest in documentary images led her to pursue a degree in psychology and photography from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, where she earned a BA in 1999. While in school, she commingled her dual studies, completing photographic projects dealing with issues ranging from sexual identity to teenage pregnancy and subsequent drug use.
Upon graduation, Jessica worked as a photographer for a string of newspapers in Columbus, Ohio. In this position, she photographed people from all walks of life, and enjoyed having her images shown in the most accessible media. She took great pleasure in being a contributor to her subjects’ fifteen minutes of fame. These photographs would not end up in prestigious art museums, but would be clipped out of the paper, and hung on the family fridge.
Although Jessica enjoyed working as a photojournalist, she became confined by the canons of journalism. She yearned to tell stories of her own making, and she moved from working in a documentary format to telling fictional stories. Towards that pursuit, she enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute. At SFAI, her exposure to the work of Jeff Wall, Sophie Calle, Ed van der Elsken, Philip-Lorca Dicorcia, and Cindy Sherman compelled her to create images that contained a narrative, but were not didactic in their methods of storytelling. During this time, she began shooting commercially for several magazines, including XLR8R, Bust, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, and more.
Since graduation, Jessica has worked regularly for editorial clients in the United States and Europe, including Intersection Magazine, Venice Magazine, Oyster, and RE:UP. In 2006, she photographed a national advertising campaign for NBC/Telemundo, and this work was featured on billboards and in print ads. Later that year, she shot the World Champion of Poker for Bodog. In 2007, she shot four advertising campaigns for AT&T which included billboards in NYC, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and store displays, print ads, and mailer pieces as well. Later that year she was hired by the Jordache brand Dittos, to create images for an advertising campaign.
In addition to working for her clients, Jessica is continually working on projects of her own creation. She has exhibited widely, including an exhibition at the Charles University in Prague, where she studied photography in the summer of 2002. Her work has also been featured in the international traveling art shows by Dublab, Up Our Sleeve and Dream Scene. Additionally, she has had solo shows of her photographic work at Lucas in Los Angeles and at the Diego Rivera Gallery in San Francisco. Her most recent work, a study of fictional female-led cults, titled Allegiance, is in progress, and has taken her to several European countries to investigate the site of her next shoot.
Jessica splits her time between Los Angeles and New York City, and enjoys walking around both cities with her beloved dog of 12 years, Dylaney aka Chicken Wing.