About

Jesse was born 1978 in Neptune, NJ, and grew up reading, loving, and drawing comics. He and his family lived there until he moved to NYC to attend School of Visual Arts for foundation year. After leaving the School of Visual Arts, he went on to attend the fine arts program at The College of New Jersey. There he focusing on painting and sculpture primarily studying with Mark Shetabi, Charles Kumnick and Sarah Oppenheimer. Just before graduating with his bachelor’s in 2002 he was able to take a satellite class in moulding and casting at the (now defunct) Johnson Atelier, Shortly afterwords, Jesse applied and was taken on as an apprentice at the Seward Johnson Technical Atelier of Fine Arts at the Grounds for Sculpture, and worked there until its closing in 2004. While there he worked on producing works of such sculptors as George Segal, Kiki Smith, Michelle Oka-Doner and more.

After the Atelier closed, Jesse applied for and was accepted to the the Rhode Island School of Design’s Masters in Sculpture program, studying with Dean Snyder and Ellen Driscoll. While there Jesse experimented with many sculptural forms including performance and installation. However, his love for figurative sculpture retuned in his final thesis work titled Hung Out to Dry in Vietnam. This experimentation with life casting and modelled forms was an important predecessor to his current Dress-Up series of sculptures.

After graduating with his Masters in sculpture, Jesse worked a series of jobs including as a freelance illustrator, Shop assistant at Schnepel Woodworking making shashes and doors for restoration, Technical Assistant at The Glass Project working at various aspects of Paul Housberg’s large scale glass installations. Later he settled into teaching and has since taught at several major colleges in the east coast including the Rhode Island School of Design, Massachussets College of Art and Design, and Monterserrat College of Art. in 2015 Jesse Moved to South East Asia to begin teaching at Singapore’s Nanyang Technologcial University in their Art, Media and Design department. There he teaches Foundation Drawing, Anatomy, Storyboarding, Comic book Illustration, Final Year project (animation), Final Year project (product design).