Jen Delos Reyes is a creative laborer, educator, writer, and radical community arts organizer. Her practice is as much about working with institutions as it is about creating and supporting sustainable artist-led culture. Delos Reyes worked within Portland State University from 2008-2014 to create the first flexible residency Art and Social Practice MFA program in the United States and devised the curriculum that focused on place, engagement, and dialogue. The flexible residency program allows for artists embedded in their communities to remain on site throughout their course of study.
She has worked with the Portland Art Museum since 2009 to create a series of programs and integrated systems that allow for artists to rethink what can happen in a museum, and reinvigorate the idea of the museum as a public space. She is the director and founder of Open Engagement, an international annual conference on socially engaged art that has been active since 2007 and hosted six conferences in two countries at locations including the Queens Museum in New York. She is currently working on I’m Going to Live the Life I Sing About in My Song: How Artists Make and Live Lives of Meaning, a book exploring the artist impetus toward art and everyday life.