Joni Gutierrez is a filmmaker, photographer, user experience (UX) designer-researcher, and educator — portfolio website: JoniGutierrez.com. In 2020, he formed Dr Joni Multimedia, LLC, a point of convergence for his diverse capacities as a digital creator. Through this, he offers his services as a media practitioner and shares his relevant knowledge and experience through workshops, tutorials, and an educational web series called “Film 101,” which is on film aesthetics, production, history, theory, and research — available on YouTube, Facebook Watch, Instagram TV, and TikTok.
Joni has more than 10 years of teaching experience as Lecturer, Instructor, and Assistant Professor in various universities and colleges where he has handled Film & Media Studies courses and served as Adviser of Bachelor's and Master's students on their research projects and film production theses. In 2018, he earned his PhD degree in Film Studies and Communication. Part of his doctoral research project was Life-world Series (dir. Joni Gutierrez, 2017, 118 minutes), a collection of 10 short films shot in Hong Kong, Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, mainland China, and the USA. These films were exhibited as a multi-screen video installation at the ASEANnale held in the Philippines in 2018. His book chapter, titled “Cinematic Contemplation Online: The Art and Philosophy of Life-world Series (2017),” which is based on his PhD dissertation (Principal Supervisor: Professor Ian Aitken), was published in 2020, in Reconceptualizing the Digital Humanities in Asia, Kung K.WS. (ed.), 31-52, Springer Publishing. All films in the Life-world Series Project — 2016 to present, adding up to 24 shorts — together with his photography portfolio that covers genres such as travel, nature, architectural, and street photography, are exhibited on his website.
Joni immigrated to the USA in 2018. His twofold practice as a Filipino-American filmmaker and a film scholar-educator is constantly guided by his advocacy for cinematic representation of minority groups. His works as a filmmaker exhibit a slice of the Filipino/Asian American experience and his worldview as a diasporic artist. As a film scholar-educator, he upholds the power of actively contributing to cinematic discourse, which is a critical arena in negotiating a more inclusive society. He has been part of the Filipino American Artist Directory since August 2020. He is the director of the film Green (2013, 69 mins), which is a documentary that intimately portrays a phenomenology of Filipino-American experience. In the same year that this film was released, his article “Philippines, Migration, 1948 to Present” was published in The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration (2013), edited by Immanuel Ness, Blackwell Publishing. From 2013-2016, as part of his PhD studentship, Joni was a Research and Teaching Assistant for multiple projects and courses at the Academy of Film and School of Communication of Hong Kong Baptist University. In 2013-2014, he served as a Research Assistant for the book, Post-1990 Documentary: Reconfiguring Independence (2015), edited by Camille Deprez and Judith Pernin, Edinburgh University Press. During his tenure as a faculty member of the University of the Philippines Film Institute (2009-2013, 2017-2018), he conducted a study on Filipino independent filmmaking in the 2000s, which was published as a journal article titled “For the Youth: Pursuing Sustainability in Filipino Indie Filmmaking” (2011) in Plaridel: A Philippine Journal of Communication, Media, and Society 8 (2): 53-70. His article, titled “Images of the Mother in Lino Brocka Films: 1970-1991” (2009), which was based on his master’s thesis, was published in volume 6, issue 2 (107-126) of the same journal.
Joni has presented research papers on film and media studies at various international conferences, which include the Poetics of Asian Cinemas Conference (2017, United Kingdom), Society for Cinema & Media Studies Conference (2016 & 2010, USA), International Communication Association Conference (2016, Japan), Asian Congress for Media and Communication Conference (2016, Indonesia, 2014, Hong Kong, 2012, Thailand), Research Institute for Digital Culture and Humanities Conference (2016 & 2015, Hong Kong), Global Symposium on Social Sciences (2014, Thailand), and Four-Round Joint International Symposium: Globalization and Localization in the New Media Age (2014, China). He has also served as speaker in seminars, forums, and colloquiums on diverse topics including film, culture, philosophy, art, and media studies — list available on his website.