Jethro Patalinghug

Transformative worlds through queerness.

Art direction, cultural productions, experiential storytelling, and film.

Portfolio Ecosystem

Three doors into one practice.

This site holds the conceptual and visual-art practice. For technology and brand storytelling, visit jethrocreative.com. For documentary film work, visit jethrofilm.com.

jethrocreative.com Technology, brand, and product storytelling jethrofilm.com Documentary films and film portfolio

Director’s Statement

I build visual worlds where identity, memory, protest, and performance become felt experience.

My work moves between documentary, sculpture, portraiture, installation, and live production. Each form becomes a container for cultural complexity, emotional precision, and spectacle with purpose.

The practice holds contradiction: glamour and grief, protest and tenderness, the personal and the political.

Selected Works

A sequence of images, rituals, bodies, and histories.

Segment 01

Origin / Invocation

Artifact 02 · Installation · Performance

Manghihilot, 2024

mythical altar / community ritual / apparition

Site: Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore.

A healing chamber built from stockings, synthetic hair, sequins, gel-colored light, projected performance, bejeweled surfaces, and a central corset.

Intention: A tentacular drag "virus" provides ritual, healing and resistance. Immortalization of Pura Luka Vega.

Segment 02

Body / Glamour

Artifact 03 · Portraiture · Exhibition

KAANYAG, 2025

Site: The Chan National Queer Arts Center, San Francisco.

Portrait series, 2025. Drag performers appear as protectors, icons, and living cultural memory.

Intention: Glamour is visibility, courage, and refusal.

III

Segment 03

Ancestry / Offering

Artifact 04 · Life-sized Sculpture

Gabriela Rising, 2023

Site: Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore.

Sculpture. A life-sized figure shaped by militant women, Gabriela, and the Babaylan — precolonial spiritual and cultural leaders.

Offering: ancestry, militancy, care, and transformation held in one body.

Segment 04

Honorific / Defiance

Artifact 05 · Sculptural Series

Disco Balling Heads, 2022

Site: Queer Arts Center, Oakland.

Sculptural heads. Drag materials, jewelry, beads, mirrors, and found surfaces become vessels of glamour and defiance.

Material memory: honorific, reflection, survival, and performance residue.

Disco Balling Heads, 2022 sculpture detail

Segment 05

Archive / Reconciliation

The Long Rescue work-in-progress screening poster

Artifact 06 · Documentary · Editorial Storytelling

Documentary Work

Film practice. Documentary is the foundation: listening, structure, and emotional truth inside complex social histories.

Reconciliation: the archive becomes a place to revisit harm, memory, intimacy, and repair.

Watch Trailer 50 Years of Fabulous, 2018 A feature documentary on the 50-year civil rights history of the Imperial Council of San Francisco. Watch Trailer My Revolutionary Mother, 2014 A personal documentary on immigration, abandonment, activism, and reconciliation. Watch Clip #MyNameIs, 2019 A documentary about the movement against Facebook’s discriminatory real-name policy.

In Development The Long Rescue, 2027 No public trailer. Creative Producer & Editor on a decade-spanning documentary filmed in Cebu, Philippines.

Recognition

Selected Awards & Fellowships

Leadership Award for Culture and the Arts — San Francisco Immigrant Rights Commission San Francisco Impact Endowment Grant (2026–27) San Francisco Artist Grant (2023) IDFA Producers Connection & Gotham Week (2024) FIFDH Impact Days (2024) Film Independent CNN Docu-Series Intensive (2022) DOC NYC Storytelling Incubator (2022) BAVC National MediaMaker Fellowship (2016)

Collaborators

Maryland Institute College of Art San Francisco Arts Commission The Chan National Queer Arts Center Parivar Bay Area GLBTQ Asian Pacific Alliance Oaklash Eyezen The Transgender District The LGBTQ Asylum Project The Immigrant Rights Commission

Contact

Let’s build the world around the story.