About Jonni Peppers:
Jonni Pepper-GoLions is a nonbinary filmmaker, currently based in Chicago. Over the course of her career, she has created 6+ hours of hand drawn animation work, including multiple animated features. She is supported mainly by Patreon and freelance work.
Jonni graduated with a BFA degree in Film/Video/Experimental Animation from California Institute of the Arts in 2019. At CalArts, she finished Wasteland, a 80 min anthology feature film, made up of 5 films she made during her time in school, concluding with the acclaimed hand-drawn film The Final Exit of the Disciples of Ascensia.
In 2020, she created a 10 episode miniseries, Secrets and Lies in a Town of Sinners, and in 2022, followed it with a feature film, Barber Westchester. Both projects were funded entirely from individual monthly donations by her Patreon supporters.
In 2025, she graduated with an MFA in Film/Video/New Media/Animation from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she completed a new animated feature Take Off The Blindfold, Adjust Your Eyes, Look In The Mirror, See The Face Of Your Mother.
Wasteland, Secrets and Lies in a Town of Sinners, Barber Westchester, and Take Off The Blindfold… are a part of the same series, The Blindfold. The finale of the series, The Cone Layer, is currently in production.
Professionally, Jonni has worked for Frederator Studios, Sony Pictures Animation, Buzzfeed, FOX, Bento Box Entertainment, Warner Bros Discovery, among others. Currently, she’s lead animation programmer at Slamdance Film Festival.
She currently runs her own traveling film festival, Transfiguration International Film Festival, which is focused on supporting marginalized artists in animation and film.
In 2022, Ottawa International Animation Festival hosted a retrospective of her work, included her in their official shorts jury, and screened Barber Westchester in their feature competition. The same year, Barber Westchester was featured at New Chitose Airport International Animation Festival in Japan, where it won a special jury award from acclaimed anime director Ayumu Watanabe.
"This movie fully embodies the meaning, power and possibilities of the technique of animation. All the visuals are carefully calculated… Its unique style was derived to strike the times more strongly, and its drawn lines are cute, but are actually frighteningly delicate. With tricky motions, the viewer is skillfully entwined with the story. When the 90 minutes had passed, I shuddered at the matching of theme and method. We felt resolution and conviction for being an animation… It is an out-of-the-ordinary film that captures the mood of this era, which is sharpened by the earnest desire to find answers, while at the same time combining the ingenuity to entertain and the pursuit of originality. The most important discovery of the decade." -Ayumu Watanabe (director: Children of the Sea, Doraemon)
Currently, Jonni is working on the finale to her Blindfold series, The Cone Layer, which will be completed by 2030. The Cone Layer is her most formally and aesthetically ambitious work yet.
Note: in 2024, Jonni changed her last name to ‘Peppers’/’Pepper-GoLions’ for personal reasons.