Jim Stulting

Jim Stulting is a Portland-based visual storyteller working across film, photography, and digital media. His creative practice lives in the intersection of observation and emotion, often turning toward the quiet or overlooked spaces that carry hidden weight. Using vintage lenses, altered optics, and improvised tools, Jim seeks not perfection but honesty, finding beauty in the fragile, the strange, and the true.

Through photography, Jim has created multiple zines, including Finding Divine (2025), a meditation on texture and memory that was paired with a virtual gallery. His ongoing Field Guide of Lost Lenses anthropomorphizes discarded glass, transforming experimental optics into characters with distinct voices and visions of the modern world. His work often bridges mediums, blurring the line between the real and the imagined, the found and the reimagined.

In film, Jim directs both narrative and documentary shorts, with a focus on voice, culture, and underrepresented stories. His most recent short documentary, The Journey of a Mural (2025), follows the Latino artist collective IDEAL PDX through the creation of a live mural at the Portland Art Museum during the pandemic, its journey into storage, and its ultimate installation at La Plaza Esperanza. The film premiered at Cine/Seen at the Hollywood Theatre and is currently being developed into a feature-length documentary.

For Jim, storytelling is not just craft but survival. It's a way to process the complexity of life and connect with others across cultural and personal divides. His work reflects resilience, collaboration, and the power of art to make visible the voices, textures, and stories that too often go unnoticed.