Jesse Voigt
Instructor
Jesse Voigt graduated from the University of Colorado with a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Design and from Savannah College of Art and Design with a Masters in Architecture, where she was awarded Excelsus Laureate (graduate valedictorian). She started her own firm Studio Jesse James with her partner James Johnson in 2015. She has won design awards for the Pink Dolphin retail space in Los Angeles and has since had her designs published in Eater, LD+A, Surface, Metropolis, and Wallpaper. Prior to starting her own firm, she lived in Japan to study the culture’s modern aesthetics in both art and architecture and in Los Angeles where she worked for famed architect Frank Gehry, with whom she helped design the Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy Museum in Paris, France and the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi. A firm believer that Architecture is the mother of all arts, Jesse is also a painter under the artist moniker Essi Zimm. She has had seven solo shows to her name, and numerous group shows around the world. Her art work was published in the 2016 New American Paintings West Edition, as well as Artillery, Art Nerd, Les Femme Folles, Momentum, Saatchi, and more. She has recently added a pottery line to her company, which showcases her hand drawn illustrations and carvings.
Prior to coming to teach undergraduate first year students at the University of Kentucky College of Design, she was also an undergraduate studio professor at the Boston Architectural Center in Massachusetts.
Her philosophy on all creative endeavors, but particularly in her own art and practice, can be summed up as visual confessions of truth. With the belief that a space can be transformed by an idea, particularly in allegories and the tales we tell, these concepts present a world vibrating with meaning, a morally charged and heavily fated universe that rejects logic in favor of the non-linear. Professor and folklorist Henry Glassie said it best, “It stresses the interdependence of the personal, the social; the aesthetic, the ethical, the cosmological; the beautiful, the good, the true….it is the study of human creativity in its own context.” It is in this arena that Jesse believes designers can thrive, to push conceptual thinking, and to ever expand their creative arsenal.