By Jared Scott Tesler

Jackson Kroopf likes to find his own way. He confesses that he never took a film course in college, and he designed his own major—Imagined Alternatives: Identity and Community—with inspiration from American pragmatist Richard Rorty, whose writings on social change he encountered in Professor Jonathon Kahn’s seminar on race and religion.

This passion about perception became apparent during Kroopf’s very first class at Vassar, Cultural Anthropology with Professor Candice Lowe Swift—with whom he would travel to Mauritius as an ethnographic research assistant and later collaborate on Dynamo, a 60-minute documentary about Vassar’s Engaged Pluralism Initiative co-directed with 15 students, five faculty, and five staff members.

“These projects involved asking how people belong to the place they find themselves in … or don’t,” Kroopf says, “and the ways in which their ancestry and family traditions, lived experience of community, and relationship to institutions impact their freedom to express and live out their identities.”

It’s clear that Vassar has had a major influence on Kroopf and his work as both an educator and a filmmaker. Kroopf credits former Associate Professor of Africana Studies Kiese Laymon (the first person Kroopf heard suggest that “Jay-Z is just as much a theorist as Karl Marx”) and Associate Professor of English Tyrone Simpson with igniting his interest in multicultural ethics and “giving greater amplification to voices that are systemically marginalized from all forms of canonized, expressive media.”

An independent study with Eve Dunbar, Professor of English on the Jean Webster Chair, familiarized Kroopf with the act and consequence of racial, cultural, and religious passing in America, while Vassar’s Prison Education Program opened his eyes to the conditions behind family separation and workforce discrimination—and restorative justice circle practice, taught by prisoners to college students inside prison gates.

“Finding ways to distill really potent speech acts and really beautiful performative moments of expression of someone’s authentic truth are things Vassar taught me to pay close attention to,” says Kroopf, who returned to his alma mater as an Adjunct Professor in the Film Department during the 2019–2020 academic year. He is now a lecturer in Cinematic Arts at the University of California, San Diego, with an MFA with Distinction from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

In 2022, Kroopf received Vassar’s W. K. Rose Fellowship in the Creative Arts, affording him the time and space to work on two feature films now five years into development.

The nonfiction film The Art of Survival tells the story of Kroopf’s relationship to a Holocaust survivor, acting teacher, and movement artist who hid her Jewish identity for 30 years, even from members of her own family. She died in July 2025 at the age of 97. The film chronicles their failed attempt to stage an original play about her survivorship, teaching, and creative practice, and Kroopf’s continuing attempt to stage it in her absence.

In a modern American society that often lacks rituals to mark major transitions in a young person’s life, Late Bloom follows two 14-year-old boys through a self-directed rite of passage—gone very badly—into the canyons and caves of Southern California, guided solely by a series of cryptic tape recordings left behind by one boy’s late father.

“At the center of both The Art of Survival and Late Bloom,” Kroopf explains, “is the question of whether the most difficult thing a person, family, community, or culture has gone through can be repaired and what the ingredients are for repair, if repair is even possible.”

Kroopf applied nine times in ten years, treating the Rose Fellowship as a yearly review of his creative practice. When he finally received the award, he says, it was “surreal” and “transformative.”

“The space the Rose Fellowship opened up has allowed me to make much slower, richer work and have relationships driven less by urgency and more by curiosity. I want to keep creatively exploring ways that people relate to place and each other throughout the world,” Kroopf says.