John Jota Leaños is a social art practitioner and who utilizes all and any media to engage in diverse cultural arenas through strategic revealing, tactical disruption, and symbolic wagon burning.

His practice includes a range of new media, photography, public art, installation, and performance focusing on the convergence of memory, social space and decolonization. Leaños' work has been shown at the Sundance 06 Film Festival, Cannes Short Corner 07, the 2002 Whitney Biennial, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

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). Leaños is currently an Assistant Professor of Social Documentation at the University of California, Santa Cruz.