Jason Hanasik is an award-winning filmmaker, artist, journalist, and curator. His work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, screened at various international film festivals, presented on stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Ace Theater in LA and featured on the BBC, The Guardian and in The Los Angeles Times. He has curated exhibitions for the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, and other institutions and his scholarship has been published in the academic journal Critical Military Studies. Hanasik’s photography monograph, I slowly watched him disappear, is in the research collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA NYC, Stanford University, the Rhode Island School of Design, and The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.

Hanasik's first short film, How To Make A Pearl, was distributed by The Guardian, nominated for a Student Academy Award and an IDA award, and screened in competition at CIFF, DOC NYC, and IDFA. He went on to work again with The Guardian's Documentaries Division, directing, editing, and shooting A Childhood On Fire, which screened at Aesthetica Short Film Festival, SFFILM Doc Stories, and at DOC NYC, where it received a Special Mention for Cinematography. His most recent short documentary, Tomorrow will be a better day in an unknown world, debuted on the front page of BBC.com and was broadcast internationally on the BBC. According to the BBC, it is the first documentary film, released by a major broadcaster, to explore the detrimental effects of gay conversion therapy on individuals living in the Middle East.

Hanasik is currently working on his first feature film, John Who Lives in the Dark, and was awarded a Catapult Film Fund Development Grant for the project in Fall 2021. He is also in production on a Virtual Reality experience related to his feature film. Hanasik has received funding for his media projects from The Berkeley Film Foundation, The Catapult Find Fund, The Pasadena Art Alliance, and The Filmmaker Fund.

Hanasik has taught students at California College of the Arts and UC Berkeley and he has delivered public lectures at a variety of institutions including SFMOMA, the Society for Photographic Education Conference, the Global Short Docs Forum, and TokyoDocs. He has completed residencies and fellowships at SFFILM, Bay Area Video Coalition, the Smithsonian’s United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and other institutions.

As a marketer, Hanasik originated the position of Storyteller in Gap’s Global Marketing Department in 2011. During his tenure at Gap, Hanasik made videos and photographs for Gap and Gap Inc, built a sustainable platform to deliver rich media experiences to Gap’s North American fleet of stores, and imagined new ways Gap could integrate their seasonal messaging with emerging technologies into the store experience. Since leaving Gap, Hanasik has created videos and still image assets for small and large brands and served as a storytelling/marketing consultant.

Hanasik has a Master of Journalism from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and a Master of Fine Arts from California College of the Arts.