About

Jenny Laden an artist, writer, teacher, organizer, fundraiser and mother. She studied studio art and art history at Barnard College and has an MFA from New York University. Her work has been exhibited in New York, Chicago, Washington, Richmond, Miami, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Berlin.

Jenny has worked as an art teacher, organized curriculum for COLAGE (Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere) and taught AIDS Awareness at numerous New York City high schools. She is a founding board member of Groundswell, NYC. She worked in the art department for Knopf Books for Young Readers and as a puppet doctor for MTV’s “Celebrity Death Match.” She ran the Environmental Art Department at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education and worked as Director of Development for Pig Iron Theatre Company in Philadelphia. Jenny is currently the Director of Development for the Institute for Contemporary Art, at the University of Pennsylvania.

Jenny lost her dad Richard to AIDS in 1992.

She lives in Philadelphia.

Her first book, “This Terrible True Thing,” will be published in fall 2023 by Blackstone publishing. It is a young adult visual novel, set in 1991 about a teenage girl whose gay father contracts HIV.

Links:

‘This Terrible True Thing’, Barnard Magazine, Fall, 2023

Philly Books We Love: Jenny Laden’s This Terrible True Thing, by R. Eric Thomas, Philadelphia Magazine, 2023

A VISUAL LOOK AT THE AIDS EPIDEMIC, This Terrible True Thing, by Jenny Laden, Broad Street Review, 2023

Pride: The Podcast, Jenny Laden, September, 2023

“Philly native channels own story of father's loss to AIDS in new novel”, Philly Live, NBC, 2023

“Writing What We Know”, GenX Stories podcast, 2022

“Unmasked: The Day I Visited Dad in the AIDS Ward”, TueNight, 2018

“Philadelphia artist remembers her father, one of the city’s early AIDS victims” WHYY interview, 2015

“Martha Graham Cracker Shines in New Portrait Series”, Philadelphia Magazine, 2013