Creative Capital

John Leanos

John Jota Leaños is a social art practitioner who utilizes 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, film, animation, public art, installation, and performance focusing on the convergence of memory, social space, and decolonization. Originally from Pomona, California, he identifies as part of the mainly hybrid tribe of Mexitaliano Xicangringo Güeros called “Los Mixtupos” (mixt-up-oz).

Leaños 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 was an assistant professor of chicana/o studies at Arizona State University from 2003–07 and is an assistant professor of social practices and community arts at the California College of the Arts.