The Creative Writing Program presents John Jota Leanos in the Winter 2015 Living Writers Series.

John Jota Leaños is an award-winning 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 Film Festival, the Morelia International Film Festival, Mexico, 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 Guggenheim Fellow in Film (2012), Creative Capital Foundation Grantee and has been an artist in residence at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Center for Chicano Studies, Carnegie Mellon University in the Center for Arts in Society, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. Leaños is currently an Associate Professor of Social Documentary at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Winter 2015 Living Writers Series:

January 15: Cherrie Moraga, poet/playwright

January 22: Veronica Reyes & Javier Huerta, poets

January 29: Korimar Press, Lorenzo Herrera Y Lozano (publisher) & Maya Chincilla (poet)

February 5: Rigoberto Gonzalez, poet

February 12: Luis Alfaro, performance artist/playwright

February 19: John Jota Leanos, filmmaker

February 26: Anita Hill, attorney

March 5: Maceo Montoya, fiction writer

March 12: student reading

The Living Writers Series is a free and public event held Thursdays, 6:00-7:45 pm in Humanities Lecture Hall 206. Click here for more information, or email ktyamash@ucsc.edu.