Bio:

Jacquelyn B. Moore (b. 1983, St. Louis, MO) is an American multidisciplinary artist working across painting, textiles, and digital media. She currently lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.

Her practice centers Black women within mythic, magical, and speculative narratives, blending fine art sensibilities with fantasy world-building. Through an emphasis on atmosphere, symbolism, and emotional realism, Moore creates images that explore power, identity, and interior life. Working fluidly between traditional and digital media, she approaches storytelling as a medium-agnostic practice, allowing each work to determine its own form.

Artist Statement:

I think of my work as a series of personal mythical stories — some brief and intimate, others expansive and epic — shaped by personal experience, current events, and inherited narratives. Fantasy, in my practice, is not escapism; it is a way of telling the truth sideways, especially when lived experience resists direct depiction. My work often centers Black women and women of color within magical or mythic frameworks, not as archetypes, but as lived bodies moving through interior worlds shaped by memory, belief, and survival.

Recurring elements in my work include women as central figures, hair, stillness over action, the body as container, and presence over explanation. These motifs function less as symbols than as experiential tools — ways of thinking through intimacy, transformation, belief, and autonomy. My figures frequently exist in moments of pause, inhabiting threshold spaces where something has just happened or is about to begin.

Across both traditional and digital media, I’m drawn to images that reward slowness — works that invite viewers to linger, sense atmosphere, and enter a narrative without being told how to read it. Through this approach, I use fantasy as a framework for emotional realism, building visual folktales that hold complexity, restraint, and quiet power.