Meet Jessica.
Jessica on set during creative production. Photographed by Mariya Byelikova.
Jessica Packard is a Chicago-based creative director and designer building distinctive worlds across interiors, brands, media production, and immersive occasions.
When Jessica has an idea, she wants to live inside it. Her creative practice emerges from a menagerie of fantasy worlds she quietly constructs and inhabits daily. Life’s casual decisions evolve into venerated curation. Cobbling together garments and interiors, pursuits and gatherings, objects and stories collected, Jessica stewards peculiar, lavish little sanctuaries for herself. Ultimately, her creative work is an intimate invitation for guests to step inside.
Jessica is fiercely drawn to juxtapositions of surrealist opulence and mundane pleasures. This infatuation has matured into instinct; she is quick to notice spectacle hiding in plain sight. To Jessica, everything is precious – especially the parts of life we often shrug off as routine or liminal. By repeatedly placing the overlooked next to the opulent, she toys with how each can illuminate the beauty of the other. Her work subtly encourages those who encounter it to sit with the soft ache of what we value and what we cannot keep.
Jessica approaches her creative projects with a decade of professional experience spanning environmental planning, community development, corporate operations, and fintech compliance. Her varied background has made her comfortable navigating ambiguity yet meticulous with detail. She has a knack for unveiling order within the unwieldy. Holding the same reverence for execution as she does for ideation, Jessica keeps projects moving forward through organized production and inventive iteration.
Jessica is a proud proponent of the Midwest, born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska. She spent her early childhood in Brisbane, Australia, where the creek behind her home seeded her fascination with meeting the mystical in our natural world. Her growing conviction that we belong to nature – nature does not belong to us – later led her to live in Uppsala, Sweden while pursuing her undergraduate studies in sustainability. Jessica now lives in Chicago with her husband and their tiny grey cat, Dolly. She enjoys wearing fake eyelashes, throwing and attending parties, and cooking too many things from scratch.
Learn more about working with Jessica here.