Jodie Mack is an experimental animator. Her films unleash the kinetic energy of material remnants of domestic and institutional knowledge to illuminate the relationship between decoration and utility. Straddling the boundary between rigor and accessibility, her cinema questions how we ascribe value to things.
Mack's 16mm films have screened at a variety of venues including the Locarno Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, the Jeonju International Film Festival, and the Viennale. She has presented solo programs at the 25FPS Festival, Anthology Film Archives, BFI London Film Festival, Harvard Film Archive, National Gallery of Art, REDCAT, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennale, and Wexner Center for the Arts, among others. Her work has been featured in publications including Artforum, Cinema Scope, The New York Times, and Senses of Cinema. She was a 2017/18 Radcliffe Fellow; a 2019 Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts; a 2021 MacDowell Fellow; and a 2022 Visual Studies Center Fellow. She is a Professor of Animation at Dartmouth College.
At MacDowell in 2025, Mack worked on her feature film, Early Mourning, Tarpon Springs. She recorded several musical and sonic sequences: a four-part choral arrangement of the Spiritualist hymnal Lead Kindly Light, resonant experiments with the piano and spirit trumpets, sections with prepared guitar and seashells, and a draft of one of the opening numbers of the film, Song of the Sponges. She shot several interior and exterior scenes for the film, including a scene at MacDowell’s amphitheater and in the Baldwin Library’s Savidge space, where she created a stained glass window that was up for eight days. She edited dozens of tiny sections of the film while working on big picture structuring strategies, and visited with high school students through MacDowell in the Schools. The film has been supported by Rooftop Films, The Leslie Center for the Humanities, and the LEF Foundation.
