Jonn Herschend was raised in a Midwestern amusement park. He is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and experimental publisher whose work explores fiction, reality, and the narrative structures that we employ as a way to explain the chaos and clutter of our everyday lives. His videos, performances, installations, and photos all incorporate sterile and formally recognizable structures such as PowerPoint presentations, academic lectures, photographic evidence, infomercials, gallery exhibitions, or educational videos. He uses these structures as a means to investigate the issues of truth and confusion, and allows the messiness of reality to eventually collapse the whole piece.

Herschend received an MFA from the University of California Berkeley in 2006 and exhibits nationally and internationally. He is a winner of three Golden Gate Awards from the San Francisco International Film Festival, and has received two Danish Arts Council Grants, the 2014 SFMOMA SECA award and the Fleishacker Eureka Fellowship. His last film, Discussion Questions, was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennale and was an official selection of the 2014 Telluride Film Festival. He is co-founder and co-editor of THE THING Quarterly and is at work on a new feature film.