Jonathan is a Los Angeles-based producer and director. 

 

He studied compositional design in painting and photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, then graduated with dean’s list honors from the world’s largest film school, Columbia College Chicago, where he received a BA in Film & Video with a concentration in screenwriting, directing, and editing.  That summer, he enlisted a crew of alum, and using 15k of his own money, produced, wrote and directed a 30 minute narrative film inspired by his experiences as a Hispanic only-child obsessed with television in a colorful 1990s Chicago west side.

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Jonathan went on to study improv at the iO Theater, intern at Avenue post production house, and work at Columbia as a digital editing lab assistant, where he supervised film production students on their use of Avid and Final Cut Pro editing software.  Making the move west in 2009, he worked in freelance video editing, both out-of-house and in-house at Subtractive in Santa Monica, where he worked promotional editorials for major multimedia clients— a long departure from his days hand-splicing raw 16mm film. 

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A storyteller at heart, Jonathan has written 6 feature screenplays, novel/novellas, and dozens of shorts and treatments for music videos he’s also produced and directed.  Music being his second passion, he feels at home collaborating with musicians, using his cinematic eye to aesthetically interpret their work in signature style.  Glazing a dark patina over visceral themes of the human condition, his characters tend live within a cautionary tale, dancing inside the penumbra.

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Jonathan placed in the short film category at the Las Vegas Film Festival for “Car Date,” a pseudo-psychological documentary about modern dating he co-directed, and made the “Hot Young Director’s to Watch For” list for his “Hateus” music video at the Los Angeles Music Video Festival.  He is currently partnered with 3 producing collaborators, shopping scripts/packages, shooting spec commercials, and is further pursing the path of music video director. 

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