About

Jess Holz is a Boston based photographer and multimedia artist whose work explores invisible worlds through microscopy, moving image, and experimental imaging systems. Working between art and science, she uses imaging technologies not simply as tools for documentation, but as ways of shifting perception, scale, and attention toward forms of life and material processes that often exist outside ordinary human experience.

Holz has been using the scanning electron microscope for artistic purposes for over 20 years, alongside extensive experience with optical microscopy, fluorescence imaging, and experimental photographic processes. She received an MFA in Art+Technology from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 2019, and currently works as an electron microscopy research fellow in a systems neuroscience laboratory at Boston University investigating the neural circuitry underlying thought and emotion.

More recent work focuses on live plankton collected from waterways around Boston and the surrounding harbor. Using microscopy, high-speed imaging, performance, and experimental imaging processes, she investigates the movements, behaviors, and fluid environments of microscopic organisms. These works explore microscopic life not as static scientific specimens, but as active and dynamic worlds filled with movement, improvisation, and agency.

Across media, Holz is interested in the tension between scientific observation and constructed imagery, and in the role imaging technologies play in shaping our collective imagination of nature. Her work often emphasizes the instability, abstraction, and strange vitality that emerge when microscopic life is viewed through technological systems. Through exhibitions, performances, workshops, and experimental media events, she aims to create immersive encounters with tiny living worlds that are normally overlooked, yet foundational to larger ecological systems.

Contact: jessholz@gmail.com