Blessing Jona
- Ph.D. Student
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Biography —
Blessing Tapiwa Jona is a Graduate Teaching Assistant and Ph.D. in Journalism and Mass Communications candidate at the University of Kansas' William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications. He is also a filmmaker, Humphrey Fellowship alumnus, and Robert Bosch African Filmmaking Fellowship alumnus. During the 2022-2023 Humphrey Fellowship at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Blessing was part of a student sustainability documentary filmmaking team that produced Forgotten Children of Mother Magma, a 10-minute documentary which went on to win 3rd place in the short form documentary category of BEA's 2023 Festival of Media Arts Awards. Prior to this, Blessing had participated in the 2017 Steppingstone Africa Filmmaking Fellowship at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Blessing has practical skills in audio-visual storytelling, screenwriting, filmmaking, and editing.
Research —
Blessings research interests lie in narrative persuasion, reception analyses, and content and textual analyses of popular films’ representations of lived experiences, within the realm of Health Communication.
Teaching —
Coming to the University of Kansas, from the National University of Science and Technology (Bulawayo, Zimbabwe), where he is a Journalism and Media Studies lecturer, Blessing has teaching experience in Media Texts and Audiences; Popular Culture: Theories and Perspectives; Communication and Media Theories, Research Methodology in Journalism and Media Studies, and Fundamentals of Film and Video Production, just to mention a few. At the University of Kansas, Blessing is teaching Data Storytelling.