Project Space Residency

May 20 – June 17, 2025

Jessica Chappe is a mixed media storyteller who focuses on how people find belonging through community, place and self. She works with photography, videography, archives, oral histories, and journalistic practices to foster collaborative processes. Her work has been shortlisted for the Sony World Photography Awards, and published by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine, and Times Union Hudson Valley. She was a featured artist at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and has worked extensively with David Hume Kennerly, Wendy Ewald, Mark Moffett, and Melissa Auf der Maur. Chappe completed the International Center of Photography’s Visual Storytelling Intensive in 2024. She holds a BFA in photography from Bard College and will commence her MFA at Rhode Island School of Design in the fall 2025.

” “Synchronicities”, named after the focus of my father’s senior thesis at VSW back in 1979, will contain three archives: personal, intergenerational, and institutional. My father, David Chappe, passed away when I was eight years old. The house I grew up in was filled with his artifacts–many from VSW–of a life well lived. These objects, especially, held more questions than answers which led to my visit in 2019 when I began connecting with his friends and was handed boxes of his work from the Trace Archive I had never seen before. This is an ongoing project piecing together his life between 1972-79 leading with the question: what did this creative network mean to him and others?”

VSW Project Space Residencies are supported by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the New York State Legislature, Monroe County, and Joy of Giving Something. Photography-based artists participating in the program receive support from the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation.