Jon Gelinas is a multimedia artist and educator whose work sits at the intersection of media, environment, and place-based experience. He brings over 25 years of experience in media, marketing, and communications across public, private, and non-profit sectors.
Teaching and program leadership
Since 2012, he has been the primary instructor and coordinator for the Multimedia Communication program. Jon’s teaching is rooted in authorship and intention, guiding students to develop visual communication solutions that tell compelling stories and inspire social change. His goal is to empower students as agents of transformation, equipping them to advocate for meaningful causes through thoughtful design and communication.
Jon’s classes emphasize both conceptual grounding and applied practice, drawing on media ecology and research-creation to help students understand media as environments rather than just tools. He aims to equip graduates with the critical and creative skills to engage audiences, challenge assumptions, and contribute to more responsive media cultures.
Creative and research practice
Jon’s personal practice leverages technobiophilia—an attraction to life and lifelike processes as they appear in technology—to explore how digital media can support connection to nature and place. Through interactive multimedia installations and immersive audiovisual projects, he experiments with sound, moving image, and interface design to create digitally mediated encounters with landscape that invite reflection and wonder.
Current research work includes a Yukon road-trip DJ project that treats the DJ mix as both artwork and inquiry, using journey-based musical storytelling, route data, and environmental imagery to investigate how media, infrastructure, and atmosphere shape ways of knowing place. Across his practice, Jon is interested in how technology can extend perception and foster more attentive, situated relationships with the land and with one another.
Design creates culture.
– Robert L. Peters
Culture shapes values.
Values determine the future.