Bio + Media Kit
Jacob Kemp is an interdisciplinary artist, actor, creative director, and writer working across performance, design, and culture.
His work has received two Gold Awards in the Graphis International Competition, for Design and Advertising. He was also the recipient of the Silver Grand Prize at the Fifteenth Annual Solas Awards for his personal essay ‘The House Within’ reflecting on creativity during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, SPINE Magazine named Kemp an emerging designer to watch in cover design, key art, and illustration. His work has been featured by Communication Arts, It’s Nice That, The World Illustration Awards, and has become a case study for Columbia University/Teachers College Arts Administration Program. He has been a guest lecturer at Parsons/The New School, and New York University.
Kemp is also known for creating roles on stage, film, and television, having appeared in Black-ish, Why Him, Newsies, and Broad City. Kemp also received a SAG Award for his work as a cast member of the celebrated series, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
His latest project, Rowen, is a giant botanical puppet made entirely of seeds and plants that fuses data and character-driven storytelling in an unprecedented initiative to inspire communities across New York City to transform vacant lots into thriving gardens, ultimately becoming a living garden itself–launching a replicable model for environmental action worldwide. Rowen was shortlisted for the 2024 DataxDesign competition.
Instead of coloring inside the lines, organizing his life into clear divisions – he encourages the strange, beautiful, funny, unpredictable, poetic, messy, honest pieces to come together – and lets them weave a story entirely their own. While the client list and portfolio is diverse, at the heart of his work lies two things: storytelling and identity. Whatever the medium, no matter the scale, his projects all align with one theme: the way we create reflects the way we live our lives.
Jacob graduated from Yale cum laude with distinction in the arts, where he was the recipient of the Glenn de Chabert Prize, the Louis S. Gimbel Scholarship, and was a Yale Trust of Boston Scholar.
He commutes between Boston and New York and is terribly grateful for Amtrak.