About the filmmaker

Johnnie Mazzocco is a storyteller and writer, filmmaker, research artist, and editor. Those who know her well call her a cosmic lightning rod, shape shifter, button pusher, and quiet storm.

She has made four films to date: I’m Too Much (2004), a 45-minute experimental autobiography; Bittersweet (2006), an 18-minute dark comedy about a woman with a chocolate addiction;  Found Objects (2008), a 45-minute short, the precursor to Found Objects, the feature length; and Always Open (in progress), an experimental documentary about motherhood.

Johnnie’s diverse background gives her a sold foundation from which to create films, her first love in her repertoire of creative endeavors. She is formally educated in fiction writing, gender studies, film studies (theoretical), and digital arts (production).

The emotional component of her work is her primary concern. She strives to create work that will invite a connection with the viewer, create public discourse, and instigate healing and change on both individual and social levels.

She approaches her work through the subjective lens by which she lives. She is a heterosexual woman who has been married and divorced twice, raised three kids, and comes from a family of origin that is a fascinating and disturbing study in the complexities and paradoxes of human character. Her relationships with people feed her compulsion to understand the dramas we all face as humans. She aligns herself with the third wave of feminism and embraces the notion that female sexuality is a potent source of power.

She is a storyteller who wishes to shed light on issues that affect us all. Most of her work, in general terms, addresses gender and relationship issues. Specifically, she is interested in family and relationship dynamics and dysfunction and how our interpersonal communications in those relationships influence our behaviors and figure into the constant reshaping of our identities. Her desire to understand our expressions of love and hate, self-love and self-loathing, desire, pleasure, and addiction as the manifestations of our collective existence is, oftentimes, an addiction in itself.

Because she works from a subjective stance, she follows her impulse to include herself in her work, thus acknowledging her unavoidable presence as maker, further encouraging a connection with the viewer and challenging the idea of spectator as Other, a separate and malleable entity.

Johnnie was born in Illinois and made a long, slow progression to the west coast via Colorado and Texas. She has lived in Oregon since 1988. Other jobs she has held are secretary, hairdresser, drill press operator, landscaper, bartender (still dabbles in this), and mother (still is – always will be).