John Valadez

John is a Peabody Award winning filmmaker, whose work has received two national Emmy nominations. He has directed a dozen documentary films for primetime national broadcast on PBS and CNN over the past 20 years.

In his work, Valadez has tackled such diverse subjects as the false imprisonment of a leader of the Black Panther; Latino gangs in Chicago; Latinos in World War II; the re-segregation of America’s schools; the history of Latino civil rights; the evolution of Chicano music; and the genocide of Native Americans in the Southwest.

John grew in Seattle, taught photography in rural India, and is professor of documentary film at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Valadez is currently developing a five - hour series for national broadcast on PBS entitled The Latin Lens. The series will tell the extraordinary history of Latinos in American cinema. From the foils in front of the lens during the early days of Hollywood, to the creative force behind the camera a hundred years later, this is the story of how Latinos navigated race, and power, and mythology, both on and off the screen to reinvented what it means to be American.