Xiaojian
(Jennifer) Zheng
Research-based artist and sociologist based in Galway, Ireland. Working across photography, film, installation and performance, she approaches place not merely as a backdrop but as something people make, contest and hold on to, treating ethnographic fieldwork as both method and material.
Biography
Xiaojian (Jennifer) Zheng was born in Tai'an, Shandong, and moved abroad at seventeen to study Communication Studies and Philosophy at Carleton University in Ottawa. She went on to complete an MA in Public Advocacy and Activism at the Huston School of Film and Creative Media, University of Galway, with First Class Honours, and a PhD in Sociology at the University of Galway in 2026. In Hilary Term 2026 she was a Visiting Doctoral Researcher at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford.
Her doctoral fieldwork in Tai'an became Desultory Narrative, a body of photographs and a 73-minute documentary shown at PorterShed, Galway, in 2025 and screened online by East Asia Film Festival Ireland. Her solo exhibition Home (2026), at the University Art Gallery, University of Galway, treated home as a fragile, shared condition shaped by displacement and exclusion, combining photography, second-hand furniture and live performance, and received around 1,200 visitors. Her photographs have also been shown at the 126 Artist-Run Gallery, Eastside Arts Festival and Clifden Arts Festival.
Alongside her practice she writes on place, voice and legitimacy, and on the conditions that make academic work possible.