Jessica Walker

<< Back to Current American Scholars

Fulbright Postgraduate Scholar

Media profile

Contemporary media culture has propelled the phenomenon of anonymous celebrity, an anyone-can-be-famous attitude associated with the proliferation of websites like YouTube, MySpace and Second Life. Intrigued by this trend in virtual self-advertising, I began researching individuals on the Internet who share my name.

Jessica Walker, currently completing a Master of Fine Arts at San Francisco State University, has won a Fulbright Postgraduate Scholarship from the Australian-American Fulbright Commission to undertake 12 months research at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT).

Jessica will conduct independent research throughout Australia by interacting with and documenting people who share her name – Jessica Walker. “My project objective is to produce documentary video and other visually-based work that constructs a mediated portrait of Australian Jessica Walkers.”

“On my Fulbright I will travel throughout the Australian continent meeting and interacting with Jessica Walkers who I have contacted online. My goal is to gain awareness of Australian society through cultural exchange with Jessica Walkers and to further explore constructions of digital self-identity.”

“My Fulbright research will build upon a project I began in graduate school where I contacted Jessica Walkers all over the world via post, email and telephone calls. I was interested in the ways in which Jessica Walkers experience the world similarly and how these coincidences are dependent on our given name. I also questioned if trust could be established among complete strangers whose only connection was a shared name.”

A graduate from the University of Virgina, Jessica has been recognised for her academic achievement with the Leo D. Stillwell Award, San Francisco State University (2007), the Murphy Fellowship in the Fine Arts, The San Francisco Foundation (2006), and the Christine Tamblyn Memorial Scholarship, San Francisco State University (2006). She was published in Hybrid Culture: Mix Art in 2007, and had a solo exhibition at Stanford University's Clayman Institute in 2006.