Burning Wagon Productions

Burning Wagon Productions’s goal is to dismantle, disrupt, and deconstruct—mercilessly—colonial history as it has been taught, rooted, and impressed upon us, and to reconstruct underrepresented histories through forms of new media and storytelling.

Founded in 2005 by artist-scholar John Jota Leaños and interdisciplinary Indigenous artist Sean Levon Nash, Burning Wagon began as both a political provocation and a creative infrastructure—a decolonial media collective designed to unsettle dominant narratives and amplify stories too often erased or distorted. Drawing together a shifting constellation of animators, musicians, composers, educators, and technologists of color, Burning Wagon operates across terrains of digital aesthetics, historical memory, and community-informed resilience.

The collective specializes in animated documentary, installation, experimental pedagogy, and transmedia storytelling rooted in Indigenous, Latinx, Black, and diasporic worldviews. From animation to opera, museum installation to street intervention, Burning Wagon blurs the lines between satire and ceremony, critique and care.

Past works include Los ABCs ¡Qué Vivan los Muertos! (Sundance 2006), the Xicanx opera Imperial Silence, and projects featured in the Whitney Biennial and cultural institutions across the Americas. Burning Wagon’s work spans decolonial media, education, live performance, radio, and broadcast—wherever stories need to be told with truth, teeth, and tenderness.

Whether scripting a cartoon or animating ancestral memory, Burning Wagon insists on a media practice that is accountable, irreverent, and necessary—not a brand, but a living practice shaped by struggle, humor, and collective vision.