ABOUT US

JESS LAMAR REECE HOLLER, Caledonia Northern Principal (b. 1988: Westerville, Ohio) is a community-based cultural worker, interpretive planner, public & architectural historian, arts administrator, former historic preservationist, exhibit co-curator and non-profit consultant based between Columbus & Marion County, Ohio. With Johnnie Jackson, Jess co-founded Marion Voices Folklife + Oral History: Marion County, Ohio’s regional folklife, public history + arts-based economic development non-profit. Since 2017, Jess has also served a wide range of non-profit & municipal organizations in & beyond North-Central Ohio, with a focus on connecting diverse communities through cultural arts, public history, & historic preservation; growing arts & culture livelihoods; diverse & multi-modal interpretation strategy — including through processes connecting generations; & community-led, co-curatorial processes. Jess’s background & primary modes include public folklore, public history, architectural history, and oral history: methods that prioritize community-led, public-facing interpretation of arts & culture, centering community voices, and utilizing a wider range of primary source documents & collaborators that traditional academic history or arts interpretive practice.

As a cultural worker & community arts leader, Jess’s greatest strength is in building innovative community arts, culture, public history & heritage initiatives from the ground up: taking expressed community need — surveyed through cultural heritage mapping processes, oral history interviews, surveys, & community forums; building coalitions; & fundraising & hustling to make it happen. Through Marion Voices & other community arts & culture projects Jess has developed — like Terradise Nature Center’s Terradise Environmental Arts Residency, & the Caledonia Farmer Market’s Summer Music Series — Jess has worked as an interpretive planner on community-based projects ranging from pop-up & digital exhibits to festivals to Ohio Historic Markers to grassroots publications to ‘zines to K-12 arts education in school & community settings. Throughout this work, Jess has developed a broad range of adaptable skills — including writing for & with multiple audiences, graphic design, project management, & budgeting — that are widely transferable to a variety of arts, culture, heritage, & museum contexts, across the public, private, & non-profit sectors. Throughout this work, Jess has been committed to a framework of equity budgeting: paying community artists & community members for their labor & contributions — and shifting local economies, institutional policies, & expectations along the way.

As a non-profit & arts/culture consultant, Jess specializes in capacity-building for small, grassroots, and community-based organizations and non-profits using a hybrid arts, heritage, and folklife toolkit; and is passionate about organizing and advising towards deep, transformative racial, social, and economic justice work in the non-profit cultural work sphere. As a grant-writer, strategic planner, & fundraiser, Jess is proud to have brought almost half a million dollars to the cultural arts sector in North-Central Ohio since 2017; and brings a broad, flexible, & scrappy skill-set as a grant-writer & program developer familiar with local, regional, state, & federal arts, culture, heritage, & preservation funding landscapes.

As an architectural historian // historian working in cultural resource management for federal/state compliance, Jess is an adaptable consultant familiar with stewarding complex preservation, mitigation, & documentation projects for clients the public, private, & non-profit sector. Jess brings an expansive toolkit in archival, oral history, folklife, & vernacular architecture research to the develoment of relevant, meaningful historic contexts, impact assessments, and historic resources survey work; as well as over a decade of practice as a working photographer & documentarian of historic architecture. Jess has worked with SHPOs in two states to list properties & districts to the National Register of Historic Places since training in architectural history at Western Kentucky University in 2015, and, as both a contract/consulting architectural historian and a former developer of NRHP-listed, Historic Tax Credit-awarded historic properties, is familiar with historic inventory, Section 106, & other regulatory compliance processes & forms from context development to documentation, from both the historian and developer side: a rare vantage in the industry that helps Jess excel in work with clients across the private & public sectors. Jess has skillfully developed historic contexts for a broad range of properties over the past decade+: including a New Deal Resettlement Administration dispersed farm community, a rural North-Central Ohio railroad village, & an abolitionist doctor’s home & office in rural Stark County, which was a pioneering location for the history of women’s medical education in Ohio & the country.

As a historic preservationist, Jess is passionate about historic preservation, place-keeping, arts- and heritage-based sustainable economic development, and culture-driven grassroots downtown revitalization efforts in rural communities across the U.S. — including in Jess’s family’s hometown of Caledonia, Ohio, located in Northeastern Marion County, where Jess worked to document, preserve, & revitalize the town’s Public Square commercial block from 2017-2024. Jess is familiar with both Ohio’s state (OHPTC) historic tax credit process, as well as the federal process; & can work with clients & serve industries seeking HTC’s to steward & manage those processes, as well as to combine HTC’s with other sources of private & public funding to make preservation projects work. Note: As of 2025, Jess is no longer actively working on preservation projects in Marion County; & is no longer associated with former preservation consultancy Public Square Heritage Futures.

Jess also thinks/writes/organizes around labor in the cultural work sector — including wage standards, precarity, freelance/contract models, grassroots/community partnerships, ethical collaboration across power differentials, and dual-system reforms that make cultural and public humanities work more sustainable both for practitioners and for communities/narrators. Jess has written on these questions, and tentative solutions for a more just & truly accessible field, and for emerging practitioners, in particular, for AASLH’s History News; and for NCPH’s Ethics & Economic Justice Working Group. With Sarah Dziedicz, Jess co-chaired the Oral History Association’s Independent Oral Historians Task Force from 2019-2021: organizing to advocate for and promote more equitable wages and practices for freelance, community-/movement-based, and non-institutional oral historians and cultural workers across the field; & lead co-authoring & co-designging the Independent Practitoners’ Toolkit for Oral Historians for the Oral History Association. Jess is deeply committed to equity budgeting in community-based public history, oral history, & folklife work — i.e., making these practices more sustaining, more equitable, and less extractive for the historically-marginalized communities they are all too often forced upon.

Jess’s non-profit capacity-building services include grant-writing, strategic planning, evaluation program development, audience & stakeholder analysis, graphic design, & marketing. Since 2020, Jess has been proud to develop arts & culture programs for a range of small non-profits in the region.

Since Caledonia Northern Folk Studios launched in 2017, we have consulted with, supported, and/or developed cultural work, community engagement, capacity-building & first-person documentary/oral history/audio projects for the following organizations and entities including: Malabar Farm State Park, the Ohio Ecological Food & Farm Association, VeggieSNAPs // Produce Perks Midwest, Foraged & Sown Farm, the Kentucky Oral History Commission, Marion County Historical Society, United Plant Savers // Sassafras Ohio, Mid-Atlantic Arts, EPICENTER, Black Heritage Council of Marion, the Village of Caledonia, the Caledonia Farmers Market, the Marlboro Township Historical Society, & Marion Voices Folklife + Oral History.

Jess holds terminal degrees in Media Arts (English) & Cultural Studies (with graduate specializations & minors in Folklore Studies, Film & Media Studies, Non-Profit Leadership, & Public Policy) from the University of Pennsylvania & the Ohio State University, as well as a freestanding MA in Public Sector Folklore from Western Kentucky University’s renowned Dept. of Anthropology & Folk Studies with coursework in Vernacular Architecture & internships in local history research, digitization, & curation: meeting the National Park Service’s Professional Standards qualifications for History & Architectural History. Jess’s academic work specialized, respectively in film/media arts & environmental/architectural/ambient media, critiques & theories of community-based arts organizing & collaboration, & public-sector folklife & community arts/culture practice, with dedicated academic training in historic preservation, vernacular architecture, folklife research methods for architectural documentation & historic context-building, & historic architecture at both Western Kentucky University & the University of Pennsylvania. Jess earned a BA in English Literature with a minor in Interpretation Theory from Swarthmore College.

In past lives, Jess has worked as a multi-media artist, working primarily in ambient soundscape composition, 16mm filmmaking, analog & digital photography, and expanded cinema // expanded sound installations: broadly inspired by the expanded cinema & community media movements of the 60s & 70s.

Beyond Jess’s community cultural & arts organizing efforts, Jess has been an intermittent college & community radio DJ since 2008.

JEFFREY PAUL NAGLE, History & Heritage Research Associate (b. 1987: Olney, Maryland) & Historical Consultant // Principal at MESSIER OBJECT, joined Caledonia Northern Folk Studios in 2021 as a Part-Time Research Associate to help build capacity for our historic preservation consulting & cultural heritage tour programs — doubling our capacity for transformative consultancy work to prepare regional nominations of vernacular buildings, districts, & sites to the National Register of Historic Places; and reinvigorating our work to develop the Ohio Soft-Serv Trail & other North-Central Ohio cultural heritage tourism resources through a focus on bike tourism & other combined sustainability-recreation-heritage solutions. Trained as a historian of labor, technology, and the environment, & with extensive experience in community-collaborative oral history & history-from-below approaches, Jeff brings over decade of experience as a teacher, archival researcher, writer, oral historian, transcriptionist & public humanist; and a decade of allied experience working in sound design, engineering, and DJ’ing, both in field settings and for community radio. Jeff’s past & ongoing projects center histories of community-centered regional planning, vernacular negotiations of spectacle in the history of the Worlds’ Fairs of the 1980s, & imaginations of environmental & energy futures in Appalachia. He is a veteran of the GetUP-Grads unionization campaign.

CALEDONIA NORTHERN FOLKLIFE STUDIOS is a cultural & non-profit capacity-building consultancy and community-based folklife, oral history, historic preservation & documentary arts studio based in Columbus, Ohio. The consultancy is named after a north-stretching road in the small town of Caledonia, where Jess's mother. From the 1930's-2010, the Reece family ran a community grocery store, Reece's Market, in the Temple Block Building in downtown Caledonia. Jess worked since high school on a vision to procure the store and continue its legacy with a difference: as a cultural organizing and regional capacity-building center for assets-based cultural, arts, and heritage organizing in the region, towards sustainable economic development, more vibrant communities, and cultivating pride-in-place & necessary justice-based transformations, alongside its neighboring Masonic Block Building — imagined, for a decade, as the future home of a regional North-Central Ohio cultural arts capacity-building & documentary arts educational center, arts space, & local foods aggregator marketplace. While the vision of Reece’s Market & the Masonic Block Building has been suspended, our studio’s name bears witness to the importance of rural revitalization efforts, but also the serious challenges facing mom-&-pop developers & small communities attempting to do this work in a policy landscape weighted heavily towards larger communities and wealthy developers: a disparity in the American preservation landscape that Jess has called/written about as the problem of preservation justice.