In addition to her own artistic practice and scholarship, Green has worked extensively in creative placemaking, film, media, and cultural activism. Green joins Chromatic Black from the Houston Cinema Arts Society (HCAS), where she served as artistic director for three years, overseeing Houston’s largest film festival – their annual Houston Cinema Arts Festival. During her tenure with Houston, Cinema Arts Festival made Movie Maker Magazine’s coveted 2021 “25 Coolest Film Festivals in the World” list, where she launched Borders | No Borders, a regional short film competition centering on Texas, border states, and Mexico. Green initiated the annual Black Media Story Summit-Texas, a free conference for Texas-based Black filmmakers, in partnership with Black Public Media and Austin Film Society, and secured participation for HCAS in the 2021 Sundance Film Festival satellite program.
Before HCAS, Jessica ran the disruptor initiative founded by the late, great documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles, the Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem. Jessica oversaw “Summer of Music,” outdoor film and live music series, “Made in Harlem,” a film and speaker series exploring Harlem’s legacy and impact. She secured the ofttimes required designation of the Maysles Documentary Center as an approved movie theater for AMPAS qualifying runs, one of the critical steps for an Oscar nomination. Green also oversaw the Oscar-qualifying preview run of Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro at Maysles.
Green was the executive editor of BET.com from 2000-to 2005, a critical period around the early convergence of television and the Internet and the re-centering of Black southern and southern-derived culture and music. At editor-in-chief of the cult ‘90s Hip Hop magazine Stress, the first magazine to put Jay Z on the cover. A Clockwork Orange-themed Eminen cover, conceived while Jessica was editor in chief, is included in Vikki Tobak’s 2018 book “Contact High: A Visual History of Hip Hop.” Jessica also continues to do independent film programming, including a film, speaker, and performance series for the Weeksville Heritage Center and a curatorial project with the Museum of the City of New York in celebration of their centennial in 2023. Jessica holds a BA from Eugene Lang College at the New School for Social Research – her Bachelor of Arts is in Writing and Literature and Black Studies, 1993. Jessica Green’s father is Ernest Green, one of the Little Rock Nine.