Rate My Professor Jon Ayon Alonso

Jon Ayon Alonso is an assistant professor of film and digital media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A native Spanish speaker from Oakland, California, by way of Northeast Los Angeles, he is a Mestizo (Comcáac/Nahua-Salvadoreño/Xicano) son of Mexican and Salvadoran immigrants. His work as a writer, director, and filmmaker centers on the hybridizations and ruptures of ancestral and modern cultures that shape urban Mestizo families, which represent a significant portion of immigrant households in North America. Ayon Alonso's academic background includes a BA in cinema production with honors from San Francisco State University and an MFA in documentary film and video production from Stanford University. His research interests encompass documentary film and studies, Latinx/Xicanx/Indigenous/Mestizo narratives, Xicanx/Latinx cinema, Mexican cinema, directing actors, independent cinema, social documentation, post-production, and film production.

He joined the UC Santa Cruz faculty in 2023 and teaches a range of courses in the Film and Digital Media Department, including FILM 20P: Introduction to Production Technique, FILM 172: Narrative Video Workshop, FILM 196A: Senior Project in Narrative Production, and Social Documentation courses such as SOCD 201A: Introduction to Documentary Field Production and Editing, SOCD 201B, SOCD 294A, and SOCD 294C. Ayon Alonso's key creative works include the short film Sombras (Shadows), which received the 2018 Grand Prize at the Francis Ford Coppola Short Film Competition; Manzanal, awarded Best Documentary at NewFilmmakers LA (2021) and other festivals; No Soy Óscar, winner of Best Short Film at the Highland Park Indie Film Festival (2022) and the President's Award at Full Frame Documentary Festival (2022); and NIKI•TOMI•BETO, his latest fiction short supported by the 2024 Berkeley Film Foundation Narrative Grant and the 2023-2024 Huerta Center Individual Faculty Research Award, currently screening at film festivals. Additional honors include a 2025 Peabody Award for editing One With the Whale, fellowships from Sundance Documentary Program Edit Lab (2023), ScreenCraft Short Screenplay (2023), SFFILM Filmhouse residency (2022), and others. These achievements underscore his influence in advancing Latinx and Indigenous narratives in independent cinema.