Jan Tompkins-Jackson is an independent artist and creative organizer working across art, design, motion, culture, and community. Her practice includes illustration, photography, painting, experimental animation, visual storytelling, graphic design, moving image, installation, and event production. She often explores the challenges and intersections of visual communication, music, and lived experience.
For more than two decades, Jan has worked across film, television, advertising, museums, digital media, and emerging technologies, creating work for clients including NBC, DIRECTV, Samsung, Google, Nike, and Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Alongside her commercial career, she has maintained an independent art practice and a longstanding commitment to creating spaces and opportunities for other artists.
In 2001, Jan co-founded United Divas, a nonprofit creative collective dedicated to supporting women as artistic leaders, innovators, and role models. Over its decade-long run, United Divas produced exhibitions, multimedia events, workshops, and publications in Los Angeles, Miami Beach, and the New York City area. The organization also awarded arts college scholarships to low-income students and spotlighted more than 44 women artists through its Diva of the Month project. Jan served as its Executive Director, overseeing its creative direction, identity, programming, events, partnerships, and community initiatives.
Her relationship to community also grew through years as a DJ and event promoter in Los Angeles and New York, where music, nightlife, visual culture, and creative collaboration became an important part of her practice. Her work often exists somewhere between the gallery, the screen, the stage, and the street.
Jan’s artwork has been exhibited internationally, including in Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Burbank, Jersey City, Frankfurt, London, Montreal, Seoul, Tokyo, Osaka, and at the Pori Art Museum in Finland. Her work encompasses illustration, photography, painting, video, animation, installation, and mixed-media projects. In 2014, photographer Chi Modu included one of their collaborations featuring Tupac in his solo exhibition Uncategorized at the Pori Art Museum. In 2018, Jan art directed live-action and post-production for two 4K video works created for the Bob Greenberg 10 Principles exhibition at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York.
Her independent practice continues alongside her commercial work through Royal Roadrunner, the creative studio she founded in Albuquerque. There, she brings the same mix of art, design, animation, storytelling, and production to projects for brands, artists, organizations, and cultural clients.
Practice: Illustration, Photography, Painting, Art Direction, Animation, Motion Graphics, Graphic Design, Visual Storytelling, Experimental Film, Video Art, Installation, Branding, Visual Effects, Event Production, Creative Programming, Community Arts, Music Supervision, DJing