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Jonathan David Kane is a Miami-based filmmaker and artist whose work focuses a lens on stories from the Caribbean, Latin America, and the American South. JDK’s films and multi-channel video installations have exhibited at festivals, museums and alternative venues worldwide, including Sundance, SXSW, Berlinale, Toronto, Rotterdam, Sheffield Doc Fest, MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum, Perez Art Museum Miami, CAC New Orleans, CERN, the New World Symphony and many more. His directorial debut film Papa Machete “boasts lush cinematography” (OkayAfrica) and “resembles a graceful dance” (NPR), and was released digitally via National Geographic and on The Atlantic Selects, garnering over 3 million online views.
JDK has produced, lensed and edited multidisciplinary work in collaboration with artists such as Terence Nance, Celia Rowlson-Hall, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Amy Seimetz, Jason Fitzroy Jeffers, Rosie Herrera, Lisa Leone, Michele Oka Doner, and Michael Tilson Thomas. His most recent collaboration with filmmaker Keisha Rae Witherspoon - entitled T - received the prestigious Golden Bear at the 2020 Berlinale Film Festival, and was distributed by the Criterion Collection.
In 2019, JDK received a NATAS Suncoast Emmy Award for Remembering Surrounded Islands, a documentary produced by the Perez Art Museum Miami and PBS affiliate WPBT2, recalling Christo & Jeanne-Claude’s monumental and historic public art project in Biscayne Bay. He is also a recipient of the Haskell Wexler Award for Cinematography for his work on the documentary At The Edge Of The World. Kane is an alumni of the Berlinale Talents program, the Oolite Arts Home+Away Artist Residency, and the Yaddo Artist Colony in Saratoga Springs, NY.
“I believe that art and film are meant to be topical and engaging to the times. That’s important to me in projects that I choose – that there’s an element of unique identity but that the stories being told can permeate internationally and be understood and related to universally.”