USA Projects

John Jota Leaños is a mixed-race Chicano new media artist using animation, documentary and performance focusing on the convergence of memory, social space and decolonization. Leaños' animation work has been shown internationally at festivals and museums including the Sundance 2010 Film Festival, the Mill Valley Film Festival 07, Cannes Short Corner07, France, San Francisco International Festival of Animation, the KOS Convention 07, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Leaños has also exhibited at the 2002 and 2008 Whitney Biennial in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Leaños is a Creative Capital Foundation Grantee and has been an artist in residence at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Center for Chicano Studies (2006), Carnegie Mellon University in the Center for Arts in Society (2003), and the Headlands Center for the Arts (2007). Leaños is currently an Assistant Professor of Social Documentary at the University of California, Santa Cruz.