About

I'm Jess Boyer — a California-based producer, photographer, videographer, and media strategist with roots in public media and documentary work.

But before any of that, I was a kid who fell in love with storytelling. It was how I coped with conflict, with change, with things I didn't know how to process yet. Years of volunteerism had taught me about giving back, about advocacy — and my professional opportunities taught me that storytelling could be the way I did both.

At 12, a letter showed up inviting me to join a video production program just getting off the ground at my junior high school. My grandfather had given me my first photography camera two years before that. I didn't know it yet, but the path was already set.

I felt like I'd found my purpose interviewing battle-scarred firefighters, the nonprofit workers and volunteers who show up when a community needs them most, officials whose decisions had consequences far beyond a press release. I'd fallen in love with listening, and with having the privilege of sharing people's successes, failures, hardships, and triumphs.

"Journalists are in the profession of giving a voice to the voiceless and holding those in power accountable," Ann Curry, a veteran journalist, once said. "It's a tough job, especially in local media where resources are limited, but the impact is profound."

By my mid 20’s, I was running a nonprofit television station in the Santa Clarita Valley - a job I hadn't planned on but felt a deep responsibility and passion for the services we provided to the community. I spent the better part of a decade there, building something I genuinely believed in. Thousands of hours of programming, tens of thousands of dollars raised for other nonprofits, dozens of community partnerships, a few awards, a lot of late nights.

All I've ever wanted to do — desperately — was take the opportunities and privilege I've been given and create more, then pass that along to others. That instinct shaped almost every decision I made there.

In 2024, I made the decision to move on. Like many nonprofits and community media organizations, there were structural and organizational challenges that made it clear it was the right time for me to step into a different phase of my career.

Taylor Swift, in her 2022 NYU commencement speech, said something about that kind of transition that stayed with me: "Life can be heavy, especially if you try to carry it all at once. Part of growing up and moving into new chapters of your life is about catch and release. What I mean by that is, knowing what things to keep, and what things to release."

I’ve kept the parts of that decade that mattered most. I released the rest. What I wanted next was to go deeper on fewer things and to bring everything I'd learned, the strategy, the editorial instincts, the camera work, the systems-building, into work that was mine.

That's what I'm doing now.

I produce, shoot, consult, and collaborate across documentary, branded content, community media, and organizational strategy. I move between video and photography based on what a project needs, and between strategy and execution based on where I can be most useful.

I do my best work with people who care about their story as much as I do — organizations and businesses who aren't looking for generic content, but for someone who'll actually sit with what makes them worth documenting. This is something I'm extremely passionate about, something I've spent years thinking about, talking about, researching. It shows in how I approach every project.

Right now I'm focused on building my business into exactly that kind of partner — for visual businesses who want consistent, human storytelling, and for organizations who need someone who can think strategically about media and then actually make it.

I've been in and around this work my whole life. I still think it's worth doing well.