Biography

Jessica Rajko is a transdisciplinary artist, researcher, and scholar working at the intersection of dance and technology. Her work investigates how complex digital systems shape—and are shaped by—dance and choreographic practice. 

Jessica’s artistic practice explores how people relate to, through, and within technology in everyday life. She designs haptic/sonic media systems that expand the sensory dimensions of performance, enabling audiences to experience movement, data, and physical presence in visceral ways. Her most recent work, Politics of the Grid, was funded by the Knight Foundation and integrates her dance-theatre practice with her custom haptic/sonic media system. She has created media for artists including Brother(hood) Dance!, BAIRA MVMNT PHLOSPHY, and Dirty Glove Bvck, with presentations at venues such as the Wexner Center for the Arts, Center for Performance Research, OT301 (Amsterdam), Currents New Media Festival, Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, Detroit Music Hall, Phoenix Art Museum, and Mesa Arts Center. 

Her collaborative research examines the entanglements of artistic labor in computing and engineering research. She is co-lead of Decoding Digital Bodies, a project that interrogates how dance shapes the code, metadata, and digital archives of Boston Dynamic’s Spot robots and Choreography SDK. This work is co-led with Varsha Iyengar and currently in collaboration with roboticists in Brown University’s Humans to Robots Laboratory. 

Jessica has presented her work at the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces, Harvard’s Digital Futures Consortium, University of Toronto’s BMO Lab, UPenn’s Price Lab for Digital Humanities, and more. Her scholarship appears in the Journal of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, Dance Research Journal, Politics of the Machine, and ACM’s International Conference on Movement and Computing (MOCO), where she also served as 2022 paper chair. She is currently Associate Chair of the Maggie Allesee Department of Theatre and Dance at Wayne State University. 

JESSICA RAJKO CV - UPDATED June 2022