Jesse Drew’s research and practice centers on alternative and community media and their impact on democratic societies, with a particular emphasis on the global working class. His audio-visual work, represented by Video Data Bank, has been exhibited at festivals and in galleries internationally, including ZKM (Germany), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), Museum of Contemporary Arts (Chicago), Barcelona Cultural Center (Spain), World Wide Video Festival (Amsterdam), Dallas Film and Video Festival. Open Country is his current film project, a feature documentary on the politics of American Country music.

His writings have appeared in numerous publications, journals and anthologies, including Resisting the Virtual Life (City Lights Press), Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture (City Lights Press), At a Distance (MIT Press), Collectivism After Modernism (University of Minnesota), West of Eden (PM Press). His new book is A Social History of Contemporary Democratic Media (Routledge). He is currently associate professor of Cinema and Digital Media at UC Davis, where he teaches media archaeology, radio production, documentary studies, electronics for artists, and community media. Before coming to UC Davis he headed the Center for Digital Media and was Associate Dean at the San Francisco Art Institute.