Jesse McLean is a media artist and educator whose research is motivated by a deep curiosity about human behavior and relationships, and the ways intimacies and connections are formed in an age of mediated experience. A primary focus of her work is the power—and the failure—of the mediated experience to bring people together. Her recent projects explore the immersion into digital culture and the fraught relationships people have with technology we both rely on and resent, and in contrasting the finite capacities of the nonhuman with infinite human desires. McLean has presented her work at museums, galleries, and film festivals worldwide, including Projections at New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Mumok Cinema in Vienna, CPH:DOX, Kassel Dokfest, and Impakt. She was the recipient of an International Critics Prize, (FIPRESCI Prize) at the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, and a Jury Prize in the International Competition at the 2013 Videoex Festival. She was a featured artist at the 2014 Flaherty Seminar and a MacDowell Fellow in 2016. In 2016 she was selected for a Mary L. Nohl Individual Artist Fellowship. She is based in Milwaukee, WI, where she is an Associate Professor of Film/Video/Animation/New Genres at Peck School of the Arts, UW-Milwaukee.