Jess Mountfield

In residence: September - October 2026

Jess Mountfield is an animation director and illustrator specialising in documentary, visual anthropology and collaborative practice. She has worked with the BBC, MTV, Adult Swim, charities and scientists across a wide range of formats, including films, idents, published children’s books, museum exhibits, installations, apps and illustrated reports.

Mountfield is interested in the transformative power of storytelling, with research interests spanning time, geology, the Arctic, our relationship with science and multi-species thinking. She is also a lecturer at the University of the Arts London.

During her residency at the Tarandus field cabin, Mountfield will continue her research into time through scientific, cultural and multi-species perspectives, drawing on her background in animation and anthropology. Following two previous summers in Svalbard, her research considers the archipelago’s layered temporal rhythms, from the deep time of geology to the cycles and timescales of lichen, reindeer, weather, light, migratory birds and microbes.

Through immersive fieldwork, Mountfield will explore these different ways of experiencing and understanding time and our place within the Earth’s temporal cycles. The research will contribute to her current writing on time, which examines how Arctic scientists understand and experience the landscape, as well as an experimental animated film currently in production. Working across writing, film, drawing and mapping, she will investigate how different forms of storytelling can communicate the complex and overlapping timescales that shape the Arctic.

Read more about the Tarandus project here.