Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Photography, Film, Video, Installation
Website: jasonhanasik.com
Jason Hanasik is an artist, filmmaker, journalist, and curator who grew up in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Summa Cum Laude, from the State University of New York at Purchase, followed by a Master of Fine Arts from California College of the Arts in Oakland and a Master of Journalism from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. He lives and works in San Francisco.
Hanasik has held fellowships at SFFILM, the Bay Area Video Coalition, and the Smithsonian’s United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In 2011, he originated the position of Global Storyteller at Gap’s Global Marketing Department, where he developed video and photography for the brand’s North American stores. He has taught photography and media at UC Berkeley and California College of the Arts, and has curated exhibitions for the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery and the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art.
His photography monograph I slowly watched him disappear (Kris Graves Projects, 2015) entered the research collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, Stanford University, the British Library, and the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. His thesis film How to Make a Pearl was a finalist for both a 2017 Student Academy Award and the IDA’s David L. Wolper Student Documentary Award, and his work has been shortlisted for the Smithsonian’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Prize and the Aperture Portfolio Prize.
Hanasik works across photography, video, documentary film, and installation, using intimate, long-term access to examine how American institutions — the military, the family, medicine — shape individual bodies and identities. His practice is anchored in sustained relationships: his foundational photo project I slowly watched him disappear documented a young man’s four-year enrollment in a high school military preparatory program, building a body of work from medium-format photographs, the subject’s own cell-phone snapshots, and video installation. This durational approach allows Hanasik to trace gradual transformation rather than capture a fixed moment.
Across his work, Hanasik interrogates Western ideals of masculinity, queer experience, class, and heroism — exploring how military discipline, conversion therapy, and trauma converge in the lives of individuals rarely centered in mainstream media. His documentary films extend this inquiry into a journalistic register: A Childhood on Fire (2019) follows a retired Marine processing a childhood of abuse, while Tomorrow will be a better day in an unknown world (2020), which premiered on the BBC, was recognized as the first documentary by a major broadcaster to examine the effects of gay conversion therapy in the Middle East.
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