Jessica Piatti began her creative life in Chicago, where she earned a BFA in Performing Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her early training in embodied, time-based art deeply shaped how she understands presence, perception, and the human experience -foundations that continue to inform her work long after leaving the stage.

Drawn toward a more direct and tangible way of caring for others, Jessica shifted paths and entered the medical field. She earned a BSN from Arizona State University and spent the next seven years working as a registered nurse in a hospital serving historically under-resourced communities. The intensity and ethical weight of this work -particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic- ultimately led her to step away from medicine and return to her creative practice.

Ceramic sculpture and graphite drawing have become her enduring modes of expression. Grounded in material, touch, and restraint, her work explores the quiet tension between light and shadow, presence and absence- serving as both inquiry and refuge. Living and working in the desert of Phoenix, Arizona, she is shaped daily by vastness, intensity, and the quiet persistence of life under pressure. The desert’s extremes- its austerity and abundance, stillness and violence- enter the work not as imagery, but as condition, sharpening her sensitivity to material, shadow, and form.