Jason Gutzmer, Adjunct Assistant Professor (Digital Filmmaking and Media Arts)

Jason Gutzmer is a father, a husband, a traveler, but is best known as an educator and visual artist. He works in a broad range of cinematography for both fiction and nonfiction, to painting constructions, digital art and design, performance art, public art installations, and web design.  He also thrives working in regenerative design, using permaculture, natural and up-cycled building techniques and designing integrated systems from food, shelter and energy.  Jason’s enthusiasm for creating regenerative culture, art, and teaching has led him from the Rockies to the Amazon, from the Andes to Indonesia, where he taught classes and led workshops in diverse realms of art and sustainability. He loves teaching and has had the pleasure of working with great students and teachers at the University of Montana for over ten years,  the Rocky Mountain School of Photography, MAPS Media Institute and with students and green educators from around the globe at Green School Bali.

After receiving a BFA in Fine Arts and working in everything from dance to photography, but better known as a painter he left to work as an educator and performance artist in Latin America with the eco-arts and service project he co-founded, La Caravana Arcoiris por La Paz. In Nicaragua he ended up holding a bounce for a documentary film and he was hooked. In Latin America, he began working in documentary films, performance art and permaculture, after seven years that led him back to academia to pursue a MFA in Digital Cinema in Media Arts. In addition to working on many films as director of photography and editor he has directed and produced much of his own work including the feature Worldbridgers, a nomad’s search for place, shot in Brazil in 2006, and the PBS documentary Sundancing with the Muse: Heyoka Merrifield’s Sacred Art Story, 2011.  At Green School Bali, he was a specialist in project-based learning integrating sustainability and visual and practical arts. Jason travels abroad regularly to teach and work on projects in art, community, and sustainability and to stay connected to the larger creative world.  Jason’s credo… “get out of the box!”