Jesse Vestermark

I love helping people, learning and aesthetics. I earned my BFA at the University of Minnesota and my MFA and MLIS at the University of Wisconsin, working for roughly a decade as a special education assistant in the public schools. Since 2008, I have been an academic librarian focusing on architecture and environmental design. During these phases, I have also worked to organize and/or facilitate arts activities in non-traditional settings such as city parks, Kennedy Library and a local homeless shelter. My current interests lie in service, art-making, mental health and analytical psychology.

Most of my childhood was spent in a diverse, middle-class enclave of the Twin Cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota, a region otherwise dominated by white, Scandinavian-American, Christian culture. I had neighborhood friends from over a dozen different countries across four different continents, leading to a lifelong respect for multiculturalism. My paternal grandfather was severely disabled, forming a generational history that resonates profoundly through my life to the present day. Regardless of the insights such experiences gave me, I am a white male who grew up in a time and place of white male privilege, and I am working on integrating corrective awareness of this privilege into my everyday life and profession.