I am currently in late development on my first full-length feature narrative film; When The River Split Open–an emotionally-driven surreal road movie about a queer Chinese American who returns to their rapidly developing homeland to find their estranged father, a marine biologist whose life was entangled with the first species of dolphin driven to extinction. It's a spiritual and physical journey about family secrets, the extinct Baiji dolphins of the Yangtze River, climate grief, multispecies justice, the ghosts our immigrant parents leave behind, and how migration impacts our ability to love. We are excited to be supported by the Cine Qua Non Lab, Canada Council for the Arts, Film Independent and Science New Wave. 

I recently completed my thesis short film, Roots That Reach Toward The Sky, winner of the NYU Sloan Production Award, which will be having it's world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival this year. Shot on 16mm it's a naturalistic film about a botanists' struggle journey toward healing after an anti-asian attack in her immigrant mother's Chinese medicine store. It talks about how diasporic plants from Asia are named to be "invasive species," when they have ancient medicinal healing properties. 

•Biography•

Jess X. Snow is a filmmaker, multi-disciplinary artist, writer and cultural worker of the JiangXi Chinese diaspora. Through a wide range of mediums—their work re-imagines mental health, kinships across cultures and species, and abolitionist futures. 

Recently named one of Filmmaker Magazine's 25 New Faces of Independent Film, with bold visuals, their genre-bending short films unveil how queer diasporic people become free. Their short films have been taught widely in university classrooms and screened at dozens of film festivals worldwide including BFI London Film Festival, BlackStar, New Orleans, Ann Arbor, Outfest LA, Cinequest (Best Student Short) & Durban International Film Festival (Special Mention). Their films have been supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, National Film Board of Canada, and the Tribeca Film Institute. They contributed cinematography to several narrative and documentary films shot in North America, the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, Vietnam and the Philippines supported by Sundance, ITVS, PBS and Topic.  They recently they recieved their MFA in writing/directing from NYU Graduate film where they were a BAFTA BBC Diversity Scholar and Ang Lee Scholar. 

A member of the Justseeds Artist Co-operative, prior to filmmaking, they spent a decade creating artwork for social movements; leading dozens of community murals on the streets of NYC, Atlanta, Bay Area, and Philadelphia that have been featured on PBS, the LA Times, the SF Chronicle, Hyperallergic and elsewhere. They collaborated with the Center for Biological Diversity on three murals as a part of the Endangered Species Mural Project.