Jess Kimura is rallying snowboarding’s ‘Uninvited’

When Jess Kimura entered global snowboarding consciousness in the 2010s – through iconic video parts of her riding steep stairsets, hucking off square roofs, and nailing tricky wall rides on brutalist concrete with steeze – it was less a gentle unveiling than a full-blown detonation.

Back then, the women’s scene was dominated by half-pipe queens, nice girl Olympians, and backcountry chargers, with few women representing street snowboarding, where – taking inspiration from skate culture – snowboarders ride man-made street architecture, often in urban settings, without much snow around to cushion their falls. Yet that milieu was where Jess would carve out her niche.

Raised in the snowboard-loving province of British Columbia in Canada, Jess – who is half-Japanese and half-Belgian – started skiing at Skistar, her local resort, but took up snowboarding in her teens and quickly became obsessed. She was a talented boardercross rider and worked with the national team, but she didn’t love the rigidity of the contest set up.

“It was super structured, and I had a couple of shitty experiences where I came home pretty burnt out,” she says. Her friend Troy showed her some street videos, which prompted her to go to her local snow park to give the rails a go. She found them super easy, no doubt helped by doing a lot of gymnastics as a kid, which gave her good balance.

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But really, she says, she fell in love with the creative freedom that riding street allowed. ​“I loved the idea that street snowboarding was a blank canvas, where you could just go out and create by finding your own spots with your crew,” she says. 

Jess wasn’t convinced she could parlay her passion into a career as a street snowboarder – and as a woman she was warned she’d be more successful in contest snowboarding – but she looked up to fellow Canadian Marie France Roy, who was making films with Rome Snowboards at the time and would later go on to star in the seminal Absinthe snowboard movies.

“She was the one girl who was accepted in an all-male crew at a guys’ snowboard brand,” says Jess. ​“It really changed my thinking in terms of what was possible for me.”

Devoid of filming projects she could join, Jess thought: ​“Fuck you guys, I’m going to make something myself,” and started to film her own stuff with friends, while working in construction at Whistler to fund her winter seasons.

Off the back of those clips, she got the opportunity to film for renowned innovative snowboard filmmakers Think Tank. ​“That was wild, as they made my favourite videos,” she says. ​“It felt like being called up to the big leagues.” It also allowed her to quit her job and snowboard full time, as she picked up sponsors including Volcom and Capita Snowboards.

In her second year as a pro, she starred in Capita’s Defenders of Awesome, which really catapulted her to global attention.

It wasn’t just the type of snowboarding that Jess was doing which felt so fresh and exciting, it was her smooth style on a board and original aesthetic of it. Was she conscious of that? ​“Oh yeah,” she says. ​“I was so pissed off, as I knew all the girls were so good at snowboarding yet when you opened a magazine, all their ads would be them all made up in a studio wearing outerwear and goggles or whatever. It was no fault of the girls, but I thought I’m never going to let anyone take a picture of me like that ever.”

There were some other women snowboarders charting a more alternative path at the time, such as Dutch rider Cheryl Maas and Janna Meyen from the US, who were also sponsored by Volcom. ​“Cheryl and Jana were the sickest – they inspired me a lot and showed a different way to be,” she says.

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The clips from Jess’s movie career show her take some heavy slams, including many to her head and face – the stakes are high when you’re travelling fast over kinked steel and stone, at one point she spits out a mouthful of blood on the snow – so I’m surprised to hear that she didn’t worry a lot about getting hurt back then.

“I’ve always felt fear – you feel the fear and do it anyway,” she says. ​“But when I was making these movies, I was more afraid of not being able to land something than the falling part.”

Jess says she was terrified of not nailing her tricks because she’d been given this sliver of an opportunity, so rare for a woman at that time, and she didn’t want to mess it up and set the perception of women’s snowboarding further back.

“Getting an opportunity to be in front of a camera wasn’t super common, so I felt I had to land those tricks,” she says. How did she feel when she did? ​“Honestly it was less a buzz and more relief, and also this feeling that I got lucky, like I’d somehow got away with it.”

Jess always had it in her head that she wanted to make a women-only snowboard film one day. As time wore on, she was constantly frustrated with the lack of opportunity that young women were getting in snowboarding. ​“There were girls around me like Darrah Reid-McLean or Maria Thompson, or even just in Whistler, and I couldn’t understand why they didn’t have something to film for,” she says. ​“The brands had all the power, and they weren’t letting the girls in the films.”

Jess says this was before the #MeToo era, though she thinks ​“those guys would have laughed at the #MeToo thing anyway”.

“My part would always get cut first. The girls’ budgets would get cut first, so that’s why I wanted to put the girls first by making the first The Uninvited film,” she says.

In 2017, while still grieving the loss of her much-loved partner Mark Dickson, who died unexpectedly three years before, Jess funded the first film out of her own pocket, buying a camera and filming it herself, during a season when she couldn’t snowboard as she was recovering from surgery. Troy, her childhood friend, did the edit the first year, though for the second one she taught herself how to edit so she could do it herself.

“I only meant to do one film but seeing what came out of it – and how some of the girls could launch careers just off the back of that one film – it motivated me to do more,” she says, and this in turn led to even more new talent coming out of the woodwork.

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She ended up making five The Uninvited films. By the final movie, women were starting to be included more by brands and even put in men’s movies, as had happened with her back in the day. She felt the women didn’t need the movie projects in the same way, but wondered how else she could support them.

“Most of all, they needed money,” she says. They were getting the opportunity to be in films but often struggled to fund the travel required for filming, which gave her the idea to start an Uninvited contest, where even the girls who didn’t win would get exposure and footage at the event.

The Uninvited Invitational contest is based around a street snowboarding set up with stairsets, rails, and sometimes even a wall-ride and a chain link fence. The kind of features Jess made her name on back in the day.

The goal is to inspire progression, she says. If one woman sees another pull off a trick which they previously thought was unattainable, they’re more likely to give it a go. But it’s also about priming the women for future films that she hopes they will star in.

“Riding street features at the event helps the girls get the tricks on lock for filming video parts – it boosts their confidence,” she says. Plus, The Uninvited helps to connect riders from all over the world who want to film. ​“Now the girls from Helsinki have a place to stay in Minnesota or Salt Lake City and vice versa,” she says.

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But the biggest prize is getting signed. The first ever winner, Jill Perkins got sponsored by a major drinks company right after she won and countless others have secured sponsorship on the back of their performances at the contest.

From its first edition in 2023, it was important for Jess to keep the event inclusive to the LGBTQ+ community, with women and those identifying as women welcome to take part. ​“That’s always been the case with the films and the events,” she says. ​“It’s for girls who didn’t feel like they had a place, who weren’t invited to other industry events.”

In 2025, riders competed for a $60,000 prize purse at Woodward Park City, Utah, and a €10,000 fund at Penken Park in Mayrhofen, Austria. 2026 will feature global online qualifiers for the wild card sports, with the contest returning to the US and hitting Japan for the first time. 

The economics might not be looking that rosy in the snowboard industry – as tariffs and snow shortages are affecting – nor are the politics in North America generally, but Jess remains optimistic about the future. ​“Times of unrest can also be opportunities,” she says. ​“Holes can open up for people to crawl through the cracks, where they haven’t previously been able to get through. I care about the snowboarding industry to a degree, but I care about the girls more, and they’re on a sick trajectory now – I see good things coming for them.”

Find out more about Jess Kimura’s The Uninvited via its official website and Instagram.

Sam Haddad is a freelance writer who writes the newsletter Climate & Board Sports.

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