Jana L. Pickart is a poet, peacebuilder, multimedia artist, and educator currently based in Jamaica Plain, MA.
She earned a Masters in Arts Politics from the Tisch School of the Arts, at New York University, where she focused her graduate study on creating poetry and durational performances to lend breath and voice towards embodied healing in the midst of trauma. Her graduate research investigated the tangible impacts of using poetry and new media as peacebuilding tools to facilitate embodied healing in . Her current projects use digital art and performance to choreograph her poetry as a moving and interactive body of work. She uses materials ranging from yards of clothesline, borrowed lingerie, smashed grapefruits, and hammers to trace the complex fractures that grief, legacies of trauma, and violation have written in silence on women’s bodies.
Jana is the recipient of writing scholarships to attend the Juniper Summer Writing Institute at UMASS Amherst and the Summer Writers Seminar at Sarah Lawrence College. In addition, she has presented poetry manuscripts for critique at Tin House Summer Writers’ Workshop in 2016 and 2013.
In 2015, she received 2 artistic fellowships from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She acted as Poetry Director for (Re)Sounding the City, a collaborative performance, funded by a Tisch GSO Interdisciplinary grant, 2014 – 2015. As an Art & Public Policy Summer Fellow, she developed her idea for a video work, using her graduate research, and presented a paper at the fellowship panel.
Her prior research and editorial experience includes positions with the Peacebuilding and the Arts Program at Brandeis University and Boston Review magazine.
Currently she teaches English for Advancement at the Jamaica Plain Community Centers’ Adult Learning Program and resides in Jamaica Plain, MA.
CONTACT
jana (dot) pickart (at) gmail (dot) com
Follow her: @JanaPickart
Full CV and references available upon request.