About

Jason Francisco (born 1967, California) is an artist and writer working on the cultural inheritance of violence, and new directions in the art of witness.  Many of his works combine observation and contemplative practice, drawing on the deep relationship between photography and poetry.

Francisco's large-scale projects include Autobiography of an Unknown American (Fall Line Press, 2024), Alive and Destroyed:  A Meditation on the Holocaust in Time (Daylight, 2021), The Camp in its Afterlives (2010-2018), An Unfinished Memory (2014-2018), After the American Century (2002-2018), Big City (1989-2022), Far from Zion:  Jews, Diaspora, Memory (Stanford University Press, 2006), and The Villages:  Rural India at the End of the Twentieth Century (1990-1997).  He is also the author of numerous limited edition photobooks, experimental photo-poetic texts and films, reportages, essays, and criticism.  This website contains some 200 of his works made between 1990 and 2024.

Francisco has worked extensively with the Galicia Jewish Museum in Kraków, Poland, where his work comprises most of the core permanent exhibitions.  In 2016, Francisco co-founded FestivALT, a Kraków-based artist's collective focusing on experimental Jewish art, performance and activism.  Since 2008, Francisco has been a member of the faculty at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.  He received his education at Columbia University, King's College London, and Stanford University.