John Jota Leaños’s practice moves across animation, installation, public art, and performance to confront colonial mythologies and illuminate suppressed histories. His work centers on memory, resistance, and the reclamation of Indigenous and Latinx narratives through media that is as much pedagogical as it is poetic.

A Guggenheim Fellow in Film and Media, Creative Capital Artist, and United States Artist (USA) Fellow, Leaños’ films and installations have been presented at the Sundance Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival, PBS, and major art institutions including the Whitney Biennial (2002), the Denver Art Museum (Mi Tierra, 2017), and the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Supernatural America, 2022). His animated documentary Frontera!—on the 1680 Pueblo Revolt—has screened internationally and remains a touchstone in Indigenous media pedagogy.

Leaños’ work has been commissioned and exhibited by institutions such as the Petersen Automotive Museum (The High Art of Riding Low), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Mexican Museum in San Francisco, and the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library (Tales from La Vida). His contributions to the traveling group exhibition Contemporary Ex-Votos: Devotion Beyond Medium (NMSU, UNLV, UIC Gallery 400, 2022–2024) and Manifesta 13 in Marseille, France, have expanded the conversation on Latinx devotion, diasporic memory, and the aesthetic afterlives of colonialism.

From large-scale installations like Destinies Manifest, a haunting animation of U.S. westward expansion, to satirical works such as Los ABCs: ¡Que Vivan los Muertos! and Evil White Foods, Leaños fuses critical theory, humor, and visual storytelling. His multimedia opera Imperial Silence: Una Ópera Muerta (2009–2017) integrated animation, mariachi, and ballet folklórico and toured cultural centers including El Museo del Barrio (NYC), Teatro Maria Matos (Lisbon), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Leaños' collaborative practice includes recent works like Ghostly Labor: A Dance Film (with Vanessa Sanchez / La Mezcla), a hybrid of video, zapateado, and tap dance that honors farmworker and domestic laborers. He also designed the projection and media for Pachuquísmo, a dance-theater production about the Pachuca experience during the Zoot Suit Riots which has been performed internationally, including at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City (2023) and El Teatro de la Ciudad Esperanza Iris in Mexico City (2024).

As a professor of Film & Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Leaños mentors students through a decolonial and community-embedded pedagogy. His practice avoids commercial imperatives, gallery representation, and extractive art economies in favor of work in service of collective memory, cultural survivance, and historical redress—especially in relation to the land and legacies of California and beyond.