Biography

Jess Blokland (nee Kalata) was a 2009 Gates Scholar in the International Relations program. She is a US-born political scientist specialized in transatlantic security policy and democratic theory. Concerned with plummeting rates of political participation across modern democracies and the lack of transnational publics in a globalized world, in April 2015 she founded the social enterprise Art is Activism to promote social and political art as a modern medium of democratic participation and social change. She is in the process of creating a transnational, nonprofit platform for activist artwork and building a global network to connect activist artists with social movements and their target publics. Jess currently resides in Potsdam, Germany, where she is finishing up her doctorate on the party politics of German external security policy. She is a member of Impact Hub Berlin and the German Mompreneurs network for female entreprenuers with children.