More About
I’m fortunate to have grown up in the American South (born in Texas, grew up in Arkansas / Southerner, not Confederate). I loved BMX bicycling and got into skateboarding in high school. I studied music in college and fell in love with poetry and cinema thanks to a few writing professors. I made music and poems while working construction and sang and wrote songs for the pop-punk band Monster Zero (listen to our album).
I moved to Napa, California in 1995 and eventually found my first career in the nonprofit performing arts as box office manager. I worked for and with a ton of arts organizations and wrote music (made an album) and poems and rode a motorcycle to work downtown San Francisco.
I had a motorcycle wreck one afternoon outside of Berkeley and in recovery took a few online classes in HTML, JavaScript, and Perl/CGI and within a year I started Grundstufe Design and started building websites and online content management systems—mostly for arts organizations in the greater San Francisco Bay Area.
In 2005 I moved to Alaska where I studied poetry at the University of Alaska Anchorage while working there with some amazing people and got to run the university website and online communications and started my second career which was really an evolution of the web work I had been doing.
In graduate school I noticed that people had a difficult time holding attention at poetry readings and we went to a lot of poetry readings and started using photos in PowerPoint presentations as backdrops to poems and then I added audio and then I added video backdrops and performed and presented poems and one day realized these were short films so that’s how I started making films and videos.
We spent a lot of time in the snow and bicycling some beautiful places in Alaska. In 2012 we moved to Idaho to be closer to family which has been fantastic. The poems I make look more like films these days but there’s still a lot of bicycling and making things which is what I’ve kind of always done and which I love.
Some formalized projects I’m working on are:
Oliver Bicycle Works - Oliver Bicycle Works creates and curates bicycle-themed fine art and vintage prints, photographs, and comfy apparel for on and off your ride. Essentially, it’s a context for bicycle-related art.
Poco a Poco and The Bailiff - feature films currently in development.
Sunset Grove Film Festival - I curate and organize a short film festival that presents films in eclectic locations a few times a year. We’ve been doing this since 2008.
The Morning Ride Pedal Powered Podcast - I record this podcast while riding my bicycle into to office. It’s completely raw and unedited. Generally topics on art, film, philosophy, and learning how to evolve as a human-type person. I stopped recording during the pandemic and, well, we’re still on hiatus.
Anthology Poems - I love recording my favorite poems and post these here on this website.
Want to collaborate? Contact me@jefferyoliver.com.