Jess Dobkin has been a working artist, curator, community activist, teacher and mentor for more than 30 years. Her practice extends across theatres and galleries, art fairs and subway stations, international festivals and museums, universities and public archives. She has operated an artist-run newsstand in a vacant subway station kiosk, a soup kitchen for artists, a breast milk tasting bar, and a performance festival hub for kids. Her projects have been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council, the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, the ASTREA Foundation, The Theatre Centre , and other institutional and community partners. She has taught as a Sessional Lecturer at OCAD University and the University of Toronto and was a Fellow at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. She received a 2018-2019 Chalmers Arts Fellowship to support her research in international performance art archives and was Artist-in-Residence at the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics at New York University. Jess is Performing Archives Lead and Collaborating Artist of Hemispheric Encounters: Developing Transborder Research-Creation Practices (SSHRC). Recent projects include her artist commission For What It’s Worth for the Wellcome Collection, London, UK and her solo exhibition, Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective at the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU) curated by Emelie Chhangur. Her first monograph, Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective: Constellating Performance Archives. Edited by Laura Levin and designed by Lisa Kiss Design (Intellect Books/AGYU, 2024) is now available. Her film and video works are distributed by Vtape and traces of her performance work are held in performance art archives internationally.