Jess Saldaña holds a BA in Music Composition and Theatre from Columbia College in Chicago, an MA in Performance Studies from NYU, and an MFA in Fine Art from Parsons with a certificate in Gender and Sexuality studies from The New School for Social Research. Their artistic work began in the public arts as a muralist on the Southside of Chicago. Transdisciplinary in practice, the work is informed by debility studies, psychoanalysis, queer theory, deconstruction, shadow feminism, and Marxist critique.