Jess Hooks fell in love with participatory art in LA area nightlife in the early 90s. While attending Hampshire College she drew a connection between the avant-garde, medieval art & literature, monotheism, capitalism and the construction of female identities. After completing post-graduate programs at FIDM & UCSC, Jess received an MFA in Dramatic Art from UC Davis. For the next ten years, she focused her efforts as a designer for contemporary dance, devised theatre, nightlife, and fashion — collaborating with drag queens and academics, designing for festivals and theatres, making work with some of the most respected choreographers, fashion labels, event producers and directors in contemporary art, performance, nightlife & fashion. In 2010 she joined the leadership of The FIGMENT Project — an arts non-profit committed to advancing social & personal transformation through creativity in the form of free participatory events across 22 cities internationally.
In 2016 Jess was awarded a competitive Erasmus Mundus scholarship for GEMMA, a joint MA in Women’s and Gender Studies at Utrecht University and the University of Łódź. Her research at POLIN, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, examined artist residencies as creative interventions in difficult heritage. In 2018 she received a UNESCO-sponsored scholarship for a second MA in Comparative Heritage Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, where she investigated Jewish non-sites of memory on Polish hiking trails. Between the two programmes, she directed participation and learning at FestivALT, an international festival of radical Jewish art and culture.
In 2021 Jess began a PhD in Cultural Studies at the University of Roehampton, London. Her thesis, Routes and P(l)aces: Walking-led Heritage in Contested Landscapes, examines what happens when a composite walking body carries feminist and postcolonial frameworks through contested English landscapes — and discovers where those frameworks stop working. The research methodology combines zines, an anarchive, and critical analytical writing across four locations: Sussex, Malvern, Barnes, and Cornwall. She has also lectured at Roehampton on heritage methodology, devised theatre, and the history of London performance.
In 2025 Jess moved base to Israel, where she is completing the thesis and beginning the next chapter of a practice that has always been about what happens when bodies meet contested spaces.