Jana L. Pickart

Jana L. Pickart is a poet and peacebuilder, a multimedia artist, and an Academic English Instructor at Suffolk University in Boston. Her graduate research at New York University investigated the potentialities for using poetry and durational performance in the adult education classroom as peacebuilding tools to facilitate embodied healing. In order to lend breath and voice towards healing,her creative work grapples with tracing the complex fractures that grief, legacies of trauma, and violation have written on her body. 

Pickart has twice been awarded fellowships from Tisch School of the Arts. She acted as Poetry Director for (Re)Sounding the City, an immersive performance, funded by a Tisch GSO Interdisciplinary grant. She won an Arts Politics Summer Fellowship in 2015 to conceptualize a video work she intends to produce as a visual meditation on the cartography of erasure enacted by unprocessed grief in her matrilineal line. 

Pickart has presented manuscripts for critique at numerous writing workshops, including Tin House Writers’ Workshop with Gregory Pardlo in 2016 and Dorianne Laux in 2013. She has attend a fiction workshop with Joan Silber at Sarah Lawrence College, and to attend a poetry workshop with Matthea Harvey at the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. Her prior editorial experience includes a position at Boston Review magazine where she published her first piece—an interview with filmmaker Anne Makepeace.

What drew you to the MA Arts Politics program?

The simultaneously nurturing and boundary breaking environment that flourishes in the Arts Politics department, founded by Randy Martin and his incredible generosity of spirit. The opportunity to experiment with new methods for directing my body of work towards fulfilling my desire to confront prejudice with imagination and bear witness with words.

How did your experience in the program shape your work?

The incredible APP professors and the peers in my cohort, hailing from around the globe, challenged me to lead investigations into what anxieties lie at the center of my quest to situate myself and my art in a geographical and a sociocultural context. Studying at Tisch invited me to further develop a deep moral imagination that I can apply to my future poetry and peacebuilding activism.

What are some of the challenges and/or rewards of this program?

The intensive structure and interdisciplinary nature of the program provide a playground for collaboration and innovation, both at the personal, micro level and also at the institutional and structural, macro level. This program will stretch your conceptual abilities beyond what you have previously imagined was possible and you’ll become more human in the process.