Meet Jennifer Zmuda

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jennifer Zmuda a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Jennifer, thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?

My work ethic comes from a lifetime of disciplined dance training. I started my serious dance training at 8 years old, and continued with increasing intensity through middle and high school, supplementing with 6-week-long live-in summer intensives at various prestigious programs around the country. Those years weren’t just about training; they were about showing up early, staying late, taking critiques seriously, and treating every rehearsal as a chance to inch closer to excellence. The rigor of that path, the long rehearsals, the repetition, the focus on memory, accuracy, and artistry wove together a mindset that results are earned, not given.

When I moved from dance into photography and video, I didn’t start from scratch. I carried that same discipline and creativity into every shoot. My background gave me an instinct for timing, movement, and how to communicate with dancers under pressure. I knew the value of preparation: scouting locations, planning shot lists, coordinating with talent, and refining edits until the movement feels alive on the page or screen. Today, I bring reliability, patience, and a relentless eye for detail to every project because I know that great dance photography isn’t just about capturing a moment; it’s about magnifying the visceral feeling in the movement and intent of the dancer.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

Jennifer Zmuda is an Emmy award-winning director and professional photographer in Columbus, Ohio; drawing on her national reputation as a dance photographer, Jennifer’s photography services showcase a passion for movement and storytelling that sets her work apart. From corporate video production to upscale commercial photography, her work is backed by an extensive portfolio of high-profile clients nationwide. Jennifer’s projects have been featured in The Washington Post, Good Housekeeping, Architectural Digest, Pointe Magazine, Dance Magazine, The Columbus Dispatch, CityScene, and many other local and national outlets. With a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of California, Irvine, she launched her photography business in 2006. She continues to shoot dance and family photography, product and lifestyle photography, corporate videos, and more.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

1) Creative Curiosity
I love to create. It’s present in almost everything I do, and I think that is a quality that is necessary when you work in the arts. Whether you’re creating an experience, a feeling, or an opportunity, we have to be excited and passionate about the creation process itself.

What to do if you’re early in your journey:
Be open to the exploration of your own ideas. We don’t often have groundbreaking, never-before-thought-of ideas in this day and age, but what we do have is our own unique experience and perspective. Sometimes, to end up somewhere new, all we need to do is start and give energy to our work.

2) Movement Literacy
My deep exposure to dance gave me an instinct for timing, line, and emotion. I can anticipate a dancer’s next move because I can feel it coming. I understand what’s valued in movement, and can shape my photography to bring those values front and center. I’m able to communicate effectively with dancers because I know the language, whether it’s using actual terminology or sometimes even grunts and sound effects to convey an idea. This fluency helps me capture motion that feels alive and authentic. Instead of simply pointing a camera and hoping to catch anything in the movement, I’m ready to align composition, light, and timing with the arc of the dance, the peak moments, the transitions, the quiet lines that tell a story.

What to do if you’re early in your journey:
Study movement not only by watching, but by doing. Sign up to take a class, attend performances, watch rehearsal footage, and learn the vocabulary of different styles. Try to describe what you see in terms of energy, shape, and intention.

3) Stubbornness
Though sometimes seen as a negative thing, stubbornness is actually what has carried me through life to a place of relative success. The concept of “no” didn’t really hold a lot of power over me. Rejection, though it still hurt, didn’t mean “give up”; it gave me the motivation to find a different way to get to my goals. Stubbornness keeps me up at night, trying again and again to solve the problem in front of me creatively. There’s always a way, no matter what someone else might tell you.

What to do if you’re early in your journey:
Develop a resistance to failure and rejection. Put yourself into situations where you have little to no expertise and just try. Fail. Then try again. Fail again. Flip your ideas upside down and try again. Life is not easy, and if it is, you’re not living up to your potential.

One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?

I am always looking for new people to collaborate with, dancers, dance studios, and dance companies, you name it. I am based in Columbus, Ohio, but would travel anywhere on this globe for an opportunity to work with someone passionate and excited to create with me. If you are interested and have an idea you want to explore together, you can contact me through my website https://jenniferzmuda.com/contact/

Contact Info:

Image Credits

Dancers: Liza Van Heerden & David Claypool, Toledo Ballet
Dancer: Vincent Van Harris, BalletMet
Dancer: Iris Dávila, BalletMet
Dancers: Sophie Miklosovic & Joan Sebastian Zamora, BalletMet
Dancers: Sophie Miklosovic & Joan Sebastian Zamora, BalletMet
Dancer: Victoria Watford, BalletMet
Dancer: Rae Parini

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