John Jota Leanos

John Jota Leaños is a social art practitioner who uses all and any media to engage in diverse cultural arenas through strategic revealing, tactical disruption, and symbolic wagon burning. His practice includes a range of new media, public art, installation, and performance that focuses on the convergence of memory, social space, and decolonization. Originally from Pomona, California, he identifies as part of the mainly hybrid tribe Mexitaliano Xicangringo Güeros, called "Los Mixtupos" (mixt-up-oz). Leaños' work has been shown at the Sundance Film Festival (2006), the Whitney Biennial in New York (2002), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Leaños is a Creative Capital Foundation grant recipient and has been an artist in residence at the University of California at 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).