Jessica Susan Oler is a visual artist, writer, and poet. She holds a Master of Fine Arts. She is currently earning her PhD in Gender Studies at Queen’s University. Her work is grounded in illness narrative and transgressive Black feminist thought. Oler utilizes photography, installation, photographic collage, painting, the moving image, and auto-ethnographic writing to grapple with the complexities of living with a chronic illness. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in her mid-twenties. Her creative work “Impairments in Proprioception/Stillness in Motion” is published in Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture & Social Justice, Special Issue: “Healing is an Act of Communion”: Critical Perspectives on Women’s Health, Wellness, and Disease Literary. In 2021 Oler was invited to Harvard School of Medicine to develop and present her patient narrative for The Healing Power of Stories: Narrative Theory and Narrative Practice. She has also worked with the National MS Society, Momentum Magazine, and has done collaborative projects with Elizabeth Jameson. In 2023 her creative work “Untitled Installation” and “Explorations in Bark” were featured in Dr. Maggie-Rose Condit-Summerson’s Dissertation: Glitching Reproductive Injustice. 

Her work has been shown at California College of the Arts, Lewis-Clark State College Center for Arts and History; Chautauqua, Rochester, and Brooklyn, New York; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Miami, Florida; Lawrenceville and Atlanta, Georgia; Alameda, Oakland, and San Francisco, California; and Alexandria, New South Wales, Australia.