Jacob Richman
Adjunct Faculty, Multimedia Department
Email: jacob.richman1@pcc.edu
Office hours: by appointment
Website: https://www.jacob-richman.com/
Hello! My name is Jacob Richman and I am multimedia artist, educator, labor organizer, and community activist.
I am fascinated by the interconnectedness of things—sounds with images, places with memories, people with the natural world. I combine video, music, custom-designed multimedia and coding to create fixed-media videos, installations, and multimedia performances that explore these connections that surround us. My research focuses on emerging media technologies, experimental performance practices, site-specific art, and activism through community-based arts. My recent work also explores the practice of “roving performances”—those in which the audience moves to experience the piece. I am interested in how movement through a performance setting can help express complex topics such as personal and collective loss, and expose the hidden linkages between things.
I believe in the ability of art and music to create community. I am co-director of Tenderloin Opera Company, a homeless advocacy music and theater group in Providence, RI, that meets weekly online and in person to check in, discuss, and make stories, songs, and Operas about homelessness in America.
I am a labor organizer, am on the executive committee of the Portland State University Adjunct Faculty Union, and am a data specialist with American Federation of Teachers, Oregon.
Before becoming an adjunct faculty member in the Multimedia Program at Portland Community College, I taught at Portland State University, University of Rhode Island, University of Michigan, Brown University, Bryant University, and have been a teaching artist at Providence CityArts! for Youth. I am a passionate educator and love sharing multimedia tools and techniques with my students and helping them find their own voice and opportunities to tell their stories.
I live with my partner, composer Kirsten Volness, dog Tito, and cat Juniper in Portland, OR.
TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
My goal as an educator is to give students a strong foundation in the knowledge and use of creative tools and techniques while allowing them space and flexibility to start creating their own work from the very first day of class. I work to present a comfortable classroom environment in which students can build their own ideas and challenge themselves through their art and research. In my classes I encourage supportive interaction between students by scheduling significant amounts of class time for student presentation of work in progress as well as peer review and discussion of this work. I present pertinent historic and contemporary examples of artwork and writings, but I feel students’ most important critics and audience are each other. Along with developing strong skills and their own unique style, it is important for students to learn the vocabulary necessary to talk constructively about their own work and others’.
As a teacher I have been lucky to have had students from a broad range of backgrounds and all levels of opportunity, privilege, and lack thereof. This includes many first-generation college attendees, older students with families of their own, combat veterans, and students who have had to run from my classes to one of many jobs they have to work in order to afford tuition. I value all my students and am proud to do my part to help them learn creative tools, hone their craft, and find their voice.
I’m proud to host a vimeo channel of my students’ work: https://vimeo.com/channels/jacobrichmanteaching