Jack Waters is a filmmaker, performance artist, choreographer and writer who has been active on New York's Lower East Side performance and art scene for over twenty years. In 1979, Waters received his BFA in Dance from Julliard College in New York City. That same year, he choreographed a performance called Personifications for Alvin Ailey's American Dance Theater. Over the next few years, Waters would go on to choreograph numerous shows for the ADT, such as Echo and Narcissus (1980), Form and Meaning (1984-1986), and Apres Minuit d'Une Faune (1983). In 1981, Waters co-founded POOL, a choreographer's collective that also created films, music, multimedia works, site-specific installations, and other exhibitions both in New York and around the world. POOL has performed and exhibited at the Kitchen, the Franklin Furnace, Creative Time, the Pyramid, La Mama, and Rote Fabric (Zurich), to name but a few spaces. Concurrently, Waters became the events coordinator for a great many performance spaces in downtown NYC, such as Area, The Saint, the Pyramid Club, Danceteria, and Limelight, in addition to clubs and venues in other cities such as Miami and Hamburg, Germany.

Waters, along with his partner Peter Cramer, undertook the first of their many collaborative projects together in 1982 when they co-founded Allied Productions, Inc., a not-for-profit multipurpose media/arts organzation. Allied Productions, Inc.'s goal was to foster a sense of community through artistic sponsorship, and to that end supported both individual and collective artistic efforts in every conceivable medium. Under the blanket of Allied Productions, Waters has produced, distributed, and exhibited films, both his and others', in a variety of venues. In 1983, Waters and Cramer also became the co-directors of the ABC No Rio art space on the Lower East Side. Their first exhibition together was the "Seven Days of Creation" show, with each day devoted to the work of a specific artist. Waters and Cramer emphasized community-building in their tenure as No Rio's co-directors (which lasted until 1988), working with public schools and settlement houses in the neighborhood to provide arts instruction for Lower East Side denizens.

In 1985, Waters and Leslie Lowe co-founded Naked Eye Cinema, an ABC No Rio-based film venue dedicated to showcasing challenging work by new filmmakers such as Todd Haynes, Jon Moritsugu, Christine Vachon, Kembra Pfahler, Nick Zedd, Todd Verow, and Cassandra Stark, among many others, beside the likes of Sergei Eisenstein, Maya Deren, and the Maysles Brothers. Naked Eye Cinema devoted itself to exhibiting both film and video in a number of galleries, salons, and nightclubs in addition to ABC No Rio. Under the combined auspices of ABC No Rio, Allied Productions, and POOL, Waters and Cramer organized and produced a number of national and international events and exhibitions.

In 1984, Waters began shooting his first film, Berlin/NY (1984-1986), which was initially used as a backdrop to one of Waters' dance performances. The film documented the similiarities between post-WWII Berlin's collapsed ruins and a pre-gentrified Lower East Side in the 1980's. Among Waters' many other film projects are The Ring Our Way (1987-1992), an ambitious multi-part retelling of Wagner's Ring Cycle that fleshes out the original work's queer subtext; Diotima (1991), which is, in Waters' own words, "a cinematic essay on the pornography debate" that incorporates the contrasting opinions of "Schopenhauer, Dworkin, and the opinions of the cast"; The Male Gayze (1990), a film concerned with "perception, observation, and erotic description"; The Flower Market (1993), a fictionalized video about the homoerotic underpinnings of New York City flower shops; Percodan and Wisdom (1995), a video tribute to the NYC piers; Introducing Mr. Diana (1996), a video portrait of underground zine artist Mike Diana; Remnants (1997), a multi-screen projection event that incorporated live performance, film, video, and slide projection which originally premiered at the Mix Festival in NYC; and Short History/No Memory (2000), a digital video documentary that traces the history of queer and AIDS activism. Waters' films have exhibited in festivals and other venues in New York, such as the Anthology Film Archives, the Millennium Film Workshop, ABC No Rio, the Collective for Living Cinema, and the Cantor Film Center. Additionally, his films have been exhibited in Los Angeles, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, and France. In 2000, three of Waters' films - Diotima, The Male Gayze, and Berlin/NY - were selected for preservation by the Estates Project for Artists With AIDS, in conjunction with Jon Gartenberg, BB Optics, and the Fales Library at New York University for an ongoing preservation project of works by HIV+ film- and videomakers.

Waters has consistently been involved in dance for the past two decades as well, either starring in or choreographing his and other people's works. The dance segments of The Ring Our Way and Remnants have been performed in various venues around New York City, and he has additionally co-authored Black and White Study (1999) with Peter Cramer. He has collaborated with Kembra Pfahler, Nicola, and Jackie Kaye in various dance projects as well. Through Allied Productions, Waters and Cramer launched the Dancetube project in 2001, an experimental performance/plastic art group that uses group expression and public performance to foster social activism and for which Waters directed the theatrical extravaganza Il Spettacolo Provolone (2003).

Over the years, Waters has been affiliated with such arts groups as Collaborative Projects, Inc. (Colab), the Millennium Film Workshop, Film/Video Arts, the American Film Institute, and the New York State Council of the Arts' Visual Arts Program. He has contributed articles on a number of topics, ranging from politics to sexuality to dance, to a great number of publications, including Poz, Fuse, Jumpcut, Lesbian and Gay New York, the New York Blade, the Movement Research Journal, and was a contributing founding writer of the Color Life news journal. Waters has served on numerous committees, including programming and selection work for the Mix Festival (1999-2000) and speaking on panels presented by the Franklin Furnace and the Estate Project for Artists With AIDS (both 2000). Waters continues to be active in the performance scene today and still lives and works on the Lower East Side.