Gallery at the Plumb Memorial Library

Jess Rodi

Jess Rodi is a multi-hyphenate creative who blends her day job as a high school Culinary Arts teacher with her love of photography, writing, performing, and directing at night and on the weekends. Jess has always had a love of photography, looking for the simplicity in each photo taken. She has always been drawn to nature and landscape photography because, within a simple frame, a quiet, serene moment can be captured and held onto forever. Even with its own imperfections, nature provides much-needed calm and beauty in our lives. Photographers such as Ansel Adams and Henri Cartier-Bresson have inspired her style. Studying different photographers has led Jess to try different techniques to grow. Jess has had the pleasure of being a wedding and portrait photographer, and enjoys capturing memories for families to cherish and pass down to future generations.

In addition to photography, Jess has spent many hours writing scripts, short stories, and poems. She has had multiple opportunities to perform in off-off-Broadway plays in New York City, as well as work on short and feature-length independent films. In 2020, silencing several years of procrastination, she finally started her very small production company, A Lonely Girl Productions. In that same year, she produced and directed her first short horror film, Midnight Snack, which gifted her the honor of “Best Female Director” for a short film from the Vesuvius Film Festival in Naples, Italy. She is currently working on a micro-short film with an intended release date later this year.