Jonna McKone is a filmmaker, photographer and freelance producer and editor based in Baltimore. She works with photography, video, archives and time-based media explore land, climate change and memory. Her work has shown in galleries, film festivals and community spaces. Jonna won a 2021 Baker Artist Award for Film, and her work has received support from the Puffin Foundation, a Rubys Artist Project Grant, a VisArts Studio fellowship and the Storytellers’ Institute fellowship at Skidmore College. As a Lewis Hine Fellow at the Center for Documentary Studies, she co-created a book of photography, which will be published by Rutgers University Press this fall. Currently, she is working on a project about colonial violence in the landscape using large format photography and experimental processes.

Her first feature film as a producer, All Light, Everywhere, premiered in Sundance’s U.S. Documentary Competition in 2021 where it won a Special Jury Award for Nonfiction Experimentation. She is an adjunct professor in photography at Johns Hopkins University and at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Before working in film, she was an award-winning radio producer and reporter whose work appeared on NPR, WNYC and the BBC and won a National Edward R. Murrow award, among others. She holds an MFA in Experimental & Documentary Arts from Duke University.

MVIMG_20200223_150706.jpg

In addition to teaching undergrad, Jonna has taught media arts workshops in throughout Baltimore, Manhattan’s Lower Eastside, with Appalshop in rural Kentucky, in Madison County, North Carolina as an artist-in-residence with the Partnership for Appalachian Girls Education and in a Boston youth detention facility with Radio Rookies. These communities and a dedication to collaboration deeply inform her artistic approach.

Grants & Awards: