Jeff Ray is an artist, musician, filmmaker, curator, festival founder, and arts and food rights activist. He is currently an IT/ Lab Tech/ technologist for the Fine Arts and Music Department for University of Nevada Reno. He starts teaching classes in digital media spring semester, 2017.He was a frequent visiting lecturer at San Francisco State University, Fine Arts Department, Conceptual Information Arts. In 2010, he received an MFA in Conceptual Information Arts (New Media) from San Francisco State University. He has won numerous awards including a Murphy Cadagon award from the SF Foundation, and in 2004 was an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. Ray has shown / performed at various venues and places such as SFMOMA, Kulturhuset, Stockholm Sweden, New Langton Arts, San Francisco, and SOMA Arts, San Francisco. In addition, he is the Founder and Executive Director of Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival. In 2004, he introduced the one of the first Bay Area multimedia performance series, Collision. The Mission Creek festival has expanded to Oakland, and Iowa City, Iowa. He has been on the Board of Directors, Advisory Board and Programming Committee at The Lab Art Space in San Francisco. He is currently a founding member and was recently the Board President of Adobe Books and Arts Cooperative where he gathered a group together to save a failing Mission based bookstore and gallery. He was recently the President of the Board of Directors and programming committee of the Mediate Soundwave Festival. He was the lead curator and resident artist of Soundwave Festival 2013, and 2014 where he explores the theme of the festival, water. He is continuing his lead curatorship, and the Board President for Soundwave in 2015 – 2016 with the theme of architecture and sound. He is currently an advisory Board member of A Ship In The Woods artist residency and Gallery, Escondido California.

I create sound and video installations, digital photographs, drawings, paintings and performances. My subject matter often focuses on nonlinear narratives set in and around the landscape in which I live and work; in other words, my home and neighborhood. My work also engages the mythical and fantastic as a means to question what is familiar. To this end, I appropriate narrative and thematic elements from literature and historical record. Elfin spirits, conspiracy theories, mythical civilizations, human attempts at achieving utopia, and post apocalyptic dystopia are some examples.

In my current work I explore the idea that nature engenders architecture which in turn influences how we see and relate to the natural world. Within this dynamic conversation I explore the way community structures have been affected by the interfusion of architecture, space and nature.