We are deeply saddened by the loss of our dear colleague and friend Jessica Clark.  Jessica was a singular visionary who loved to play, imagine and create.

She was funny and she liked to laugh. But she was also deeply serious and believed in the power of media to affect change and uphold democratic principles. She could zoom in and out and see the trends and the possibilities for the future. She was a futurist.  

Her prescient report Public Media 2.0 written with Professor Pat Aufderheide in 2009 was a rallying call for public media leaders to harness the capabilities of digital tools and the participatory culture they enabled with standards and guideposts to ensure meaningful engagement. Arguments that are still needed today.

Her groundbreaking book, Beyond The Echo Chamber: Reshaping Politics through Networked Progressive Media written with Tracy Van Slyke in 2010 revealed a new progressive, influential media ecosystem that few knew existed.  She offered a roadmap to join.

She became a sought after thought leader for foundations, media organizations, and other non-profits wanting to know how to navigate the changing media landscape. In 2013, she founded Dot Connector Studio, a container for her strategic and out-of-the-box thinking. 

At the MIT Open Documentary Lab, she was a frequent speaker. She first came to talk as a core member of Localore, a cutting edge initiative helmed by Sue Schardt that invented new forms of community engagement with local public media. Jessica also spoke about the future of arts and again about the future of media, this time in the context of the visionary book that she wrote together with Kamal Sinclair, Making a New Reality. Jessica had an enormous impact and left us a trailmap of what media in the public interest could be.  A leading thinker in public media, immersive arts and journalism, she could tie them all together. 

She became a research affiliate at the lab when Immerse, an online publication focused on immersive documentary, began in 2016. As co-founder of Immerse, a partnership between Dot Connector Studio, MIT Open Documentary Lab, and originally Tribeca Film Institute, supported by Fledgling Foundation, she served as editor, publisher and knowledgeable person at the table. She was a rigorous, insatiably curious and talented writer and editor. While at Immerse, she also started a column, Interfaces Everywhere, “exploring the implications of storytelling and art at the cusp of the physical and the digital,” a thread you can see throughout her work. 

Jessica was deeply respected by her community for her intelligence, humor and unconventionality.  You could find her giving a talk at the MIT Center For Civic Media or sitting on the floor of a Sundance condo guiding everyone through an exercise in making holograms with plastic cones. 

Today, we face a crisis of democracy that she feared and worked so hard to avoid, and we owe it to her to dig out all the roadmaps that she left behind to continue imagining and creating the democratic future that she envisioned.

Remembered equally for her playful physical inventions as much as her prescient books and reports about the digital world, she could always connect the dots. We will miss her dearly. 

You can contribute to her memorial fund here.