Photograph by Johanna Foster, 2014
I make video and audio documentaries and visual art informed by over two decades of experience as a sociologist and teacher. I love asking questions and listening to people's stories. I am documentary artist across multiple media (audio, film, photography, comics) and I see documentary work as an act of bearing witness with compassion. It is a gift when people open their lives to me. My work highlights people's creativity and will to thrive. I also make other visual art across multiple media to keep myself joyful. I presently incorporate art making into my work as a community organizer for Showing Up for Racial Justice at Sacred Heart Community Service in San Jose. I also direct the 1500 Stories project, a large scale cooperative art and digital storytelling project about economic inequality in the U.S. All ten episodes of Season 1 of the 1500 Stories podcast are now available just about anywhere you listen to podcasts. The 1500 Stories podcast cracks open the uncomfortable subjects of money and economic class. If you want a peek inside the kinds of experiences people usually don’t share in casual conversation, listen to 1500 Stories. While the 1500 Stories website features individual narratives, the podcast combines and weaves together many voices on a different theme each episode, using interviews contributed to the project. You can help support the podcast and my ongoing creative work (which has been entirely a labor of love above and beyond my day job) by becoming a patron at https://www.patreon.com/jenmyhre, by leaving a review on your podcast app, and by sharing both the podcast and my Patreon link in your social networks.
I have a Ph.D. in sociology from UC Davis with an emphasis on social movements and inequalities and a graduate certificate in documentary filmmaking from George Washington University. For 20 years, I loved teaching and working at a California community college, a public institution that embodies the radical notion that everyone has a right to a higher education. I received the Distinguished Educator Award at De Anza College in 2007. In 2010, I began pursuing training in film, photography and visual arts. In 2014, one of my photographs was chosen for the juried exhibit, Altered Views, at the Lightbox Gallery in Astoria, OR. In 2017, a collaborative piece I made with my students entitled Who(se) Shares? exhibited at the Euphrat Museum of Art in the curated Justice for All? show. After a series of artist profile shorts, I completed my first feature length documentary, Homie UP: Stories of Love and Redemption, which won a Silver in the Spotlight Documentary Film Awards in 2015. The second film I collaborated on, Berning Love, was an official selection in 2017 at the Berlin Independent Film Festival, Green Mountain Film Festival, Rincon Film Festival and the Bay Area Women in Film and Media International Shorts Showcase and won Overall Best Documentary Short at Rincon. It aired on PBS in Vermont in December 2017. For this film, I worked as associate producer, co-editor, second camera and director of research. I am currently in post-production on my first historical documentary, entitled The Spider Web, about the U.S. War Department’s surveillance and propaganda campaign against feminist pacifists in the wake of the First Red Scare. I was a 2018 Belle Foundation for Cultural Development grantee and a 2019 Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Community College Faculty Fellow. For an abbreviated CV/resume, click here.
I was born in Tucson, AZ/occupied Tohono O’odham land and though from 3 months old through 12 years I grew up on rural Long Island NY, I imprinted on the muted palette and rugged beauty of the Sonoran desert landscape. Trees are overrated. I still need to see the horizon. California gives me just enough big sky to satisfy that urge. I love climbing big hills, both literal and figurative. And I could not survive without my sense of humor. Finally, when I’m not teaching or making films or making art or working on 1500 Stories, I have been organizing with the San José chapter of Showing Up for Racial Justice since December 2016. I also make zines and political graphics as visual messaging in my organizing work.
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