Jacqueline Passmore is an award-winning artist, director and producer based in London. Her films and installations immerse audiences in stories and sensory experiences which ignite moments of clarity and human connection. Passmore builds visually captivating, spare cinematic constructions which invoke vast narratives, inciting viewers to explore large ideas like empathy and perception. She is American-British and of Sámi descent.

Passmore’s work has been shown by Tate Modern, Berlinale Talents, Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA), Foundation for Art & Creative Technology (FACT), Tate Liverpool, Festival Internacional de Cine de Huesca, Aesthetica Film Festival, photographer Nick Knight’s showstudio, and music festivals like Coachella and EXIT Festival, exhibiting in over 30 countries.

She’s directed & produced commercial films and visually pioneering projects for major museums, designers and record labels, like Design Museum, Pritzker Prize-winning Zaha Hadid Architects, and Island Records. She is the former Head of Production of multiple award-winning creative studios, including Faye Toogood, with clients like Commes des Garçons and Hermès, and an interaction design practice with clients including Adidas, Microsoft, Google, and Nokia.

Passmore began her career creating her own hand-manipulated film and video performances which she performed live in concert with musicians, including seminal female-led electronic groups Stereolab and Ladytron, on tours across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. These experiences of repeatedly live mixing her own abstract films for mass international audiences were formative to her interest in narrative construction, the universal language of abstraction, and the collective intimacy of audiences and subcultures.

Passmore is fascinated by the generosity of minimal narratives, abstraction in storytelling, and collective sensory communion.  She works interchangeably across moving image media, from short-form narrative film to hand-painted film and live video, imbuing her work with a sense of tactility and immediacy. She has a reflexive relationship with moving image tools, modifying equipment and processes to reveal elemental phenomenon like feedback and light oscillation, exploring the constructs of moving image the way musicians experiment with sound. Counter to the culture of technical exclusivity in filmmaking, her work often exposes the mechanics of how films are made, opening cinematic grammar and narrative devices up to viewers as gently defiant offerings.

Passmore’s practice is grounded in inclusivity and lived experience; she’s shot projects in the post-industrial North of England, on tour across China, and in the West Texas desert. She engages in dialogue and collaboration with diverse communities including composers and symphony orchestras, veterans with PTSD, architects, neurodiverse young people, visually impaired dancers, and psychiatric in-patients. She has lectured and led engagement programmes for the British Film Institute (BFI), The Photographers Gallery, Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool, Art on the Underground, film charity First Light, National Health Service (NHS), Foundation for Art & Creative Technology (FACT), academic and university Doctorate, MA, and BA programmes such as Liverpool John Moores School of Art & Design.

Passmore studied film production in Austin, Texas, and photography in NYC, where she worked for Rolling Stone Magazine Chief Photographer Mark Seliger. As a film student in Austin, she was an organiser of the celebrated experimental film and arts festival Cinematexas. Supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Cinematexas was called “the most promising and pioneering film festival in the world” by Filmmaker Magazine.

Her work has been supported by partners like Kodak, Arts Council England (ACE), Berlinale Talents, British Film Institute (BFI), UK Film Council, Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Korg, Experimental Television Center of New York, Vision + Media, ScreenSkills, vidvox, Korg, and British Council.

She is a mentor through Creative Access, supporting talented people from underrepresented backgrounds in the screen industries.