About

My name is Jaqlin Paige Medlock, but just about everyone calls me Jaqi.  I live in my photo studio (which also doubles as my dance space) in an old warehouse turned artist building in Jersey City with my husband and our 2 cats.  I spend my days moving, learning, tending to my to-do’s and fussing with the composition of just about everything. I’m conscientious, intuitive, creative, curious, and efficient. I’m a Taurus from the Bronx, New York, and an ENTJ-T & counter phobic Enneagram Six Personality Type. I love animals, I enjoy traveling, and I was born hard of hearing.

I believe who I am today has a lot to do with my upbringing. You see, as a toddler I was fascinated with photographs and would arrange them to tell all sorts of stories, so I was encouraged to play with them. I also couldn’t sit still during 80’s dance movies, so I was encouraged to dance. I was too young for the local dance studio, so my parents held weekend “Ballet” classes for me at home. “Ballet” of course meant they played Van Halen and set me free to mimic the movie Flashdance to my hearts content. I would put a tutu over my pajamas and use the oven handle as a ballet barre while splitting my attention between staring at my reflection in the mirror (aka the oven) and hamming it up for my mom’s camera. I didn’t know it then, but how I spent my time as a child wouldn’t change much into adulthood.

Today, when people ask what I do for a living, my answer is that I work with people who are in need of capturing movement. As a dancer, I embody movement and perform it. As photographer, I preserve moments in time for authentic promotional images. I rely heavily on my intuition to take images, and its undoubtedly guided by my dance training.

I’ve trained in a variety of styles of dance, but have concentrated the most on ballet, jazz, partnering, and tango. I graduated cum laude from Marymount Manhattan College with a BFA in Dance and a minor in Photography. Upon graduating I worked with various choreographers (check out my Dance CV below) but ultimately found my home with Stephen Petronio Company in 2011, where I remain dancing today.

My photography career developed simultaneously and organically alongside my dance career. What started off as photographing friends for fun quickly grew into requests from other dancers take their audition photos and photograph their shows. Seeing opportunity, I officially created a business. That same year I became a preferred vender at Steps On Broadway and my photography was featured on the cover of a magazine (you can see my Photography CV below too). Today, my clients include dancers of all levels, fitness models, choreographers, dance companies, dance schools, dance-wear designers, retailers and magazines, as well as festivals, musicians, animal rescues, pet parents, and corporations.

As a dancer who is interested in photography, I naturally gravitated towards dance modeling. Modeling for other photographers has served as a wonderful learning experience for me, teaching me a lot about lighting, how to run photoshoots, and also about what I needed as a dancer in terms of direction (and then I built my studio with these needs in mind). My first job ever was as a model for Dance Spirit Magazine. I was 14 years old and did a step by step partner work instructional and a bun tutorial. Ironically, the photographer for that shoot was Eduardo Patino, the same photographer I would intern with while in college (but not realize it until years afterwards). Since then I’ve worked with reputable photographers and videographers including Jacob Pritchard, Noah Kalina, Daniel Robinson, Blake Martin, Rick & Jeff Kuperman, Pete Thompson, Sarah Silver and Inez & Vinoodh, appearing in magazines, international campaigns, advertisements, dance wear catalogs and music videos. I’m grateful for these experiences as they’ve helped formulate the priorities of my own work.

So thats me. I’d like to help you in any way I can. If you are in need of a fresh perspective, contact me. I’d love to have you over for coffee, listen, and offer advice where I can.  If you need a dancer to work with, contact me. If you are interested in my photography services, contact me to set up a free consultation.

Photography cv

Dance cv