About Cassidy Mae Jackson
I am an interdisciplinary artist and critical theorist working between performance, poetry, textiles, and sculpture. I feel a deep gravitational pull towards the handmade, the earnest, the meditative, the maternal, and the midwestern, which is reflected in my artistic work. My work has largely been preoccupied with explorations of empathy and our inner emotional lives. As an academic, my work is focused on feminist theory, performance studies, and critical craft studies and I am particularly invested in decolonial research practices. Being able to work between mediums and within multiple disciplines simultaneously challenges me and feeds my work conceptually. By examining my own emotional life in my work I hope to bring attention to the potentially radical political ramifications of the personal and what we can gain through empathy for one another.
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, thank you to my thesis professors Wendy Muniz and May Joseph; your guidance and insight turned this project from the spark of an idea into something beyond what I could have imagined. Wendy, thank you for pushing me in new and challenging directions, helping me sort through all my ideas, and for all of your film insights; I would have been lost without them. May, thank you for talking me through my doubts, your writing advice, and for your kindness and flexibility—you are a model of how higher education should be. Thank you to the Critical and Visual Studies Class of 2021, your questions, insight, and perspectives have been inspiring, and I have adored working with you all. My utmost gratitude to Julia Steinmetz for listening to my initial ideas and pointing me in the right direction; your thoughts were invaluable. Thank you to Alina Tenser and Maria Damon for helping me create my initial reading list before I had any idea what this project would be.
Thank you to Bobbi Rose Ribblett for your time, perspective, and kindness when I was overwhelmed and lost. To Jeff Berger-White: thank you for teaching me to write and teaching me to believe that I was good at it; this doesn’t exist without that. Thank you to Leah Schwartz for your support and ears as I figured all this out. To my dearest Anna Keating, thank you for sending me PDFs from the NYU library, for helping me format my very first script, and for answering all my panicked and desperate Adobe Premiere questions. You are a saint, and you saved me more than once. To Gama and Pa: thank you for letting me use your house and for your constant support and love. To Ambria Safford, thank you for letting me barge into your room to vent and for always making the days when this was hard a little brighter. There is no one I would rather have toiled with these past many months.
To Lara Darling and Jasmine Bryant, thank you for giving me something to look forward to every week. Carly Rose, thank you for your unconditional friendship and love. To the makers of my baby quilt, Momo, Megan, Donna, Debbie, Sara, Mary, Lyn, Mom, Grandma Hammer, and Gama: thank you for the many many gifts, quilt included, you have all given me by simply being in my life. I am who I am today because of you and your love. Gama, thank you for teaching me to sew; it changed my life. Grandma Hammer, thank you for always encouraging me to be creative and for my very first sewing machine. To Amy Muller, Hannah Weisnoski, and Rebecca Yang: my loves, thank you for being a part of this, and thank you for your friendship over the years; I am so lucky to have found you all. Sweet Savanna, I am so happy I got to share this with you; thank you for letting me teach you how to sew; I love you so much. To my parents: I am so lucky to have you; I love you. To Mike Mckenna: this performance and film (like so many things) would not have been possible without you. Thank you for always being there to help and for your constant support. To my dad, thank you for modeling how to follow your passion; you inspire me every day, and your love and support has formed this project as it has formed me. To my mom, thank you for the quilt and for everything else, more than I can name. In the end, this project is a love letter to you. Thank you for always being there to listen, for being the model of unconditional love, and for making all of this possible.
In its truest essence, this project is a celebration of community, and it would not have been possible without the help and support of everyone listed here and even more that I can not possibly name. I am eternally grateful.