Jed Jackson studied art at the Memphis College of Art (BFA 1977), the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and received an MFA from Cornell University in 1980. He has exhibited his work in France, Holland, Switzerland, England, New York, Chicago, St. Louis and many other centers. His work has been recognized with 12 fellowships from Arts Midwest/NEA, Tennessee Arts Commission, Arkansas Arts Council, MidAmerica Arts Alliance, Cornell Univeristy and recently the Rocheforte-en-Terre residency sponsored by the Maryland College of Art and the Department of Morbihan, France. He has taught at the college and university level for 26 years and is current Department Chair and Professor of Painting at the University of Memphis.

Jed Jackson makes paintings that traffic in ideas from politics to social culture—from serious to not so serious(funny). He counts amongst his muses the spirits of Mark Twain, Stanley Kubrick, Jack Kerouac, Erich von Stroheim, Christian Schad, Otto Dix, Ernest Hemingway, Gloria Swanson, Maynard G. Krebs, W.C. Fields, Billy Wilder, John Huston, Winston Churchill, Buster Keaton, Leni Riefenstahl, Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Arthur Conan Doyle, Arnold Schoenberg, Gustav Mahler, Ulf Timmermann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ezra Pound and most of the painters in the history of western civilization and some who hail from other locales. He considers the work he does as a kind of image sorting—a kind of improvisation. Convincingly painted images are necessary to bring the whole collage of ideas and references off.
He thinks paintings are still more important than movies.