Human consciousness asks, “What am I?” as it moves through a larger world, grasping for autonomy and grace. Jeannette Louie traces these fragile currents of thought, following how the singular self becomes entangled within cultural, political, and social frameworks. Her documentations represent the formation of identity—its crises, revelations, rewards, and disillusionments—through film and interdisciplinary visual art.
Louie is a director of documentary and experimental films, as well as a visual artist working across mediums. Her films have screened internationally at festivals including AmDocs, RiverRun, Hot Docs, Florida, Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Le FIFA, Vancouver, Montclair, Philadelphia Asian American, Maryland, CAAMFest, Los Angeles Asian Pacific, Antimatter, Aesthetica, Asian Film Festival of Dallas, Peloponnisos International, The Black Maria, Imagine Science Films, STATE Experience Science, CineGlobe at CERN, Minneapolis Underground, Toronto Independent, Columbus, Brooklyn Film, Message to Man, Big Muddy, and Athens International, among others. Her films have received awards from Reel Sisters of the Diaspora, Bolton, Tallgrass, Seattle Asian American, and the American Psychological Association.
She is a recipient of the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Creative Capital Foundation Fellowship, and multiple Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation fellowships, and has held residencies at The Bogliasco Foundation, Gapado AIR South Korea, Willapa Bay AIR, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, Yaddo, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, Skowhegan School, Sculpture Space, Vermont Studio Center, Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, P.S.122 Project Space Program, and the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop.
Her work has been exhibited at the Exploratorium (San Francisco), Artists’ Television Access (San Francisco), Cinesonika 3 (Northern Ireland), [.Box] at Visualcontainer (Milan), Platform Seoul, Esso Gallery (New York), the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art (New Mexico), Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts (Michigan), Homie (Berlin), Mills College Art Museum (California), SPACES (Ohio), Alberto Peola Arte Contemporanea (Turin), the Montclair Art Museum (New Jersey), and the Noyes Museum (New Jersey).
Louie’s films often merge analytical inquiry with philosophical narrative. Amygdala, awarded by the American Psychological Association, explores post-traumatic stress disorder. The Land Within, awarded at WorldFest-Houston, imagines a neuron questioning the existence of the human soul. Empire of My Melodious Mind, awarded by Reel Sisters of the Diaspora and Bolton, unfolds as an animated bilingual rumination. Her recent film, Us Being Epic, is a sweeping chronicle of the cultural and political lives of her Chinese American parents, set against the backdrop of photographic history.