John Jota Leaños is a social art practitioner and cultural worker from the Inland Empire of Southern California. An Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Transborder Xicana/o & Latina/o Studies at Arizona State University, Leaños comes from the chiefly hybrid tribe of Mexitaliano Xicangringo Güeros, "Los Mixtupos."
Leaños' social art practice focuses on the convergence of memory, history, social space, aesthetics and deterritorialization. He is a founding member of the Burning Wagon Collective. He worked with Los Cybrids: La Raza Techno-Crítica and helped start the Digital Mural Project at the Galería de la Raza in San Francisco. His work has been seen at the Sundance 06 FIlm Festival, the 2002 Whitney Biennial in New York, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, MoCA of Los Angeles, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and San Francisco Art Commission Gallery.
Leaños is a Creative Capital Foundation Grantee and has been an artist in residence at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Center for Chicano Studies (2005), Carnegie Mellon University in the Center for Arts in Society (2003), and the Headlands Center for the Arts (2007).