Profile

Jennifer K Reeder

Education



Jennifer Reeder constructs personal fiction films about relationships, trauma and coping. Her award-winning narratives are innovative and borrow from a range of forms including after school specials, amateur music videos and magical realism. These films have shown consistently around the world, including the Sundance Film Festival, The Berlin Film Festival, The Tribeca Film Festival, The Rotterdam Film Festival, The London Film Festival, SXSW, The Venice Biennale and The Whitney Biennial.  Her awards include several that have qualified her films for Oscar nomination. She won a Creative Capital Grant in Moving Image in 2015, short film funding from Rooftop/Adrienne Shelly Foundation in 2016 and short film funding from the Hamburg Film Fund in 2016. She was a USA Artist nominee for 2008, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2020. She was a Herb Alpert Film Award nominee in 2018. She won a 2018/19 scriptwriting award from SFFIM/Rainin Foundation. She was the 2019 recipient of the Alpert Film Award residency at the MacDowell Colony. Her most recent film, Knives and Skin was theatrically released in France in November 2019 through UFO and in the US in December  2019 through IFC Midnight. She is currently in pre-production for a new feature length film called PERPETRATOR which is being produced by 30West and WTFilms.Jennifer received an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently a Professor in Moving Image, serving as the Interim Director/ Director of the School of Art and Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 2017 until 2022.    

She was nominated for the 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2008 Rockefeller Grants for Film/Video/New Media and was also nominated for a 2001 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award for visual art, a 2004 Richard H. Dreihaus Foundation Award and a 2012 A-38 Production Grant (Kassel Germany). She is a 2010 Efroymson Family Fund Fellow. She recently founded a social justice initiative called TRACERS BOOK CLUB.

Jennifer received an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives in Indiana with her three children.

Courses Taught


ART 275 Writing for Moving Image (fall/yearly)
ART 272 Moving Image 1 (spring 2013)
ART 401/402 BFA Thesis (fall 2012/spring 2013)