John A. Bruce is a filmmaker, educator, and practice-based researcher.

His work engages moving image as a form of inquiry into social, political, and existential conditions, and involves research in and through aesthetic and narrative experiments. His practice is informed by presence, proximity, nonlinear time, participation, queerness, situatedness, care, and collective thought and action.

He directed and produced, in partnership with Paweł Wojtasik, the feature-length non-fiction film End of Life, the result of six years spent with five people at various stages of dying. His work has been exhibited internationally, including the New York Film Festival, Cinéma du Réel at Centre Pompidou, International Contemporary Arts London, Museum of the Moving Image, Doclisboa, Thessaloniki Film Festival, Kerala Film Festival, RIDM Montreal, e-flux, Chicago Film Festival, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, PBS, Showtime, VICE, and MTV, Equitable Vitrines Los Angeles, among others.

He is Associate Professor of Design Strategies at Parsons School of Design, The New School, and serves as Co-director of the Transdisciplinary Design MFA program and the Consortium for Trans/disciplinarity. He co-founded the research studio Design for Living and Dying, and his current research studio Collective Fabulation. He is a member of Vaporia Collective.

His earlier work in design and participatory research informs an evolving practice centered on moving image, narrative, and collective inquiry. He has also worked as strategist for The Light Phone, a simple phone that provokes reflection on our relationships with technology and our ability to be present, and also served as production manager, art director, and platform producer across feature films and transmedia projects addressing social issues.

He served on the Board of Trustees for the Flaherty Film Seminar. He earned a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, and an MBA in Sustainable Systems from Pinchot (Presidio). He was a 2015/16 Fellow at the Graduate Institute for Design Ethnography and Social Thought at The New School.