John D. Scott is Associate Professor of Media Arts, Sciences, and Studies, co-creator and one time director of the documentary studies and production degree at Ithaca College.
Scott’s films have won more than twenty awards in festival and gallery screenings across Europe, Asia, Africa, North, South and Central America. His work has been featured as part of the State Department’s worldwide tour in the American Documentary Showcase, has screened at the Institute of Contemporary Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Hot Docs Documentary Film Festival, and done very short theatrical runs at cinemas in Ithaca, NY and Brookline, MA. His films have been favorably reviewed, described, and sometimes panned in all manner of publications from niche academic or online journals, academic books, regional weeklies, independent blog posts and also some major North American/European publications that include The New York Times , The Globe and Mail , The Toronto Star , Der Freitag, and Filmmaker Magazine.
Scott has directed two critically acclaimed feature-length documentaries that have been broadcast or streamed nationally in Canada by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) or The Documentary Channel. One reviewer called his first feature documentary Scouts are Cancelled a “cinematic marvel … ” and “a literary portrait you won’t soon forget.” Another called his second feature-length project Elizabeth Bishop and the Art of Losing a “mesmerizing 84-minute masterpiece.” Prior to joining academia, he worked as an independent director/producer and editor. He also worked on two seasons as a field producer for the consumer and media-advocacy show for teens, Street Cents. In one of those years, it won a Gemini Award (Canada's Emmy) for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Scott’s creative work centers on poetic documentary and poetic fictional forms whose goals are to engage viewers in a unique, visceral, and engaging story design that is often centered on the productive power of conjuring playful creative energy in the face of difficult circumstances. He also likes sad and quirky pop songs. His latest independent project Modern Fables for Complicated Times is a visual album that features four songs and contains multiple short films. The project braids music, poetry and space flight visuals into a fantastical animal-character-world whose protagonists struggle against the ever-isolating forces of modern life. Modern Fables will have a prolonged cascading launch beginning sometime in 2027. One of the short films in the series The Limits of Math, was a finalist at the NASA sponsored CineSpace Short Film Competition in 2025, and so far in its multiple forms, the film has won ten awards and distinctions on the festival circuit.
Scott teaches documentary filmmaking, fiction filmmaking and editing classes and he works to help students make their best work possible, and to get their projects out in the world in meaningful ways. Students in his classes regularly screen their projects in festivals, they sometimes win prizes, and many have had their work broadcast or stream on PBS affiliated sites. Scott earned a BFA in Film Production from Concordia University, in Montreal, a BA in Honours English from Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and an MFA in Film and Video Production from the University of Iowa. Scott grew up in Nova Scotia, Canada and identifies as a Maritimer.