Jen Heuson is a scholar, filmmaker, and sound ethnographer interested in the relationships between place, travel, and sensory heritage. Her work examines how sound is used to produce and preserve frontier ideology in American West tourism and the consequences for indigenous aural and sensory sovereignty. She also examines how places record and playback the past and the future. Her other research passions include ethnographic fiction, phenomenology, sensory cinema, and asynchronous sound-image making. She is (very slowly) writing a science-fiction novel about stone tape theory in South Dakota and completing Sounding Western, a film and community-engagement project about Lakota aural sovereignty.

Jen teaches documentary filmmaking and sensory ethnography at the Rutgers Filmmaking Center and Rutgers Arts Online and film history and theory at Brooklyn College. Her award-winning short films have screened at FLEX Fest, Big Muddy, and the Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival. She has produced sound ethnographies of New York City and South Dakota’s Black Hills and has written articles for Contemporary Music Review, Ethnoscripts, and Mediapolis.