Jessica Elefante is a writer, filmmaker, and cultural researcher whose work has always been a defense of the full life—the one we're built for, and keep getting pulled away from.

She founded Folk Rebellion in 2013—widely recognized as one of the original tech-critical voices of the digital wellness movement—after experiencing digital dementia firsthand, and spent the decade that followed writing, filming, speaking, and leading workshops and digital detox retreats from Mexico to the Arctic Circle about attention, agency, and the quiet erosion of everyday life. Her book Raising Hell, Living Well (Ballantine/PRH, 2023), endorsed by Jaron Lanier, arrived at the end of a decade of work that had been covered by TIME, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Vogue, The Atlantic, Wired, and the Los Angeles Times. She leads the Brooklyn chapter of Mothers Against Media Addiction and stood with Governor Hochul at the signing of New York's student cell phone ban.

Today her focus has widened. Mapping Humanity, developed with author and Columbia professor Elizabeth Greenwood and fiscally sponsored by Entertainment to Affect Change (E2AC), is a multimedia investigation—behavioral study, documentary, and analog media installation. She's set out to map and preserve the emotional and biological textures of our humanity, document the erosion of shared public space, and discover which human behaviors, like species in a threatened ecosystem, can still be protected, restored, and passed on—deliberately, by hand, in person, and on purpose—before the habitat is gone.

She lives and works in New York City.