Jon Wagner has been a faculty member of the School of Critical Studies at CalArts since 1988. After graduate work in comparative literature and creative writing, he completed a PhD in Critical Studies from the School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California. He helped establish the MFA Writing Program at CalArts with Dick Hebdige in 1994 and served as associate director of the program from 1996 to 2002, when he assumed directorship through Spring 2005. He is also an adjunct professor in cinema at USC. His PhD dissertation, Film Fatal: Essays in Spectatorial Decline has been published as separate articles in the journals The USC Spectator, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Coil, Merge and in the anthology Resolutions: A Critique of Video Art. His chapter Lost Aura: Benjamin, Bazin, and the Realist Paradox received a Best Essay Award from the Society of Cinema Studies. Wagner's poetry has appeared in the journals Errant Bodies, Dreamworks, Trepan, in the anthologies Blind Date and Things That Quicken the Heart, and in multi-media installations in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. He did the voice-over narration for Hartmut Bitomsky's 2001 documentary B-52 and is a consultant on Josh Dinner's documentary Critical Grounds, about the current state of art criticism. He has written critical reviews of the Spanish video artist Adria Julia for the Madrid catalog Ocupaciones and of Dwayne Moser's photography, video, and painting for Zingmagazine. Dedicated to collaboration, Wagner along with Chris Peters and Tracy Biga MacLean wrote an interactive review of the novelization of Chris Marker's film La Jete entitled Pre/post-erous for the electronic book review ebr 9: image and narrative. With Lynne Goodhart, he edited, translated, and introduced the book of selected poems Andre Chedid; Fugitive Suns for Green Integer Books, and their translations of Chedid's poetry and selections from Pierre Bourgeade's novel Jewish Souls appeared in the Paris literary journal Cargo. Wagner and Goodhart have also published articles on French poetry, cinema, and literature (Yves Bonnefoy, Saint-John Perse Marguerite Duras) in Cargo, Cincinnatti Romance Review, and Mosaic. His book with Tracy Biga MacLean, Television at the Movies: Cinematic and Critical Responses to American Broadcasting, was published by Continuum Books, New York and London, in May 2008. A chapter from this book, The Vidiot, appears in the Fall/Winter 2005 issue of Black Clock.

His current work includes the completion of a book length manuscript of translation and commentary with Lynne Goodhart entitled Word Uncrucified: Sutras of the Threshold in the Poetry of Yves Bonnefoy and Saint-John Perse. His paper with Tracy Biga MacLean, "Greenaway in Japan," was selected for presentation at the international conference of the Society of Cinema and Media Studies in Tokyo, Japan in May 2009, and he has been invited as a Visiting Scholar in Film Theory at Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China, in June 2010.

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