Born in Chicago on May 16, 1943, of a military family, Jon Jost grew up in Georgia, Kansas, Japan, Italy, Germany and Virginia. Expelled from college in 1962, he began making 16mm films in January, 1963. He is self-taught. He has made 46 feature length films on celluloid, 16 and 35mm, and digital media, all of which he has conceived, written, photographed, directed and edited; most of these he also produced. He has made more than 50 short works, and as well as one large-scale 7 screen installation work, TRINITY, presented at the ZKM, Karlsruhe Germany.
After 10 years of making short works 1963 – 1973, Jost made his first feature-length film in 1974, and since devoted himself to the making of a wide-ranging series of films, largely focused on specifically American topics, in forms ranging from essays (Speaking Directly, Stagefright, Plain Talk & Common Sense), to fictions (Last Chants for a Slow Dance; Bell Diamond;The Bed You Sleep In) to documentaries (Nas Correntes De Luz da Ria Formosa, London Brief) and hybrids such as Angel City. In Digital Video his work shifted to include highly abstract works such as Passages, Trinity and Dissonance.
His work has shown widely in museums, film archives, and festivals since 1975. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, presented a complete retrospective of Jost’s work in January 1991. This subsequently traveled to the J.F. Kennedy Center, Washington DC, the Harvard Film Archive, the UCLA Film Archive, The Film Arts Foundation of San Francisco, as well as to the Bergamo Film Meeting 1993, the Viennale festival 1993, the Bologna and Torino Film Archives in Italy (1995). His films were accorded full retrospectives at the Cinemateca Portuguese (1996) and the Filmoteca Español (1997), and in 2006 the Buenos Aires Independent Festival accorded his work a partial retrospective.
