Jonathan Dawson (24 November 1941 – 10 August 2013) was an Australian academic, filmmaker, film and literary critic and broadcaster.
Dawson continued to publish poetry and short stories, but left the full-time film industry to set up the new media studies department and screenwriting courses at the University of Canberra, leaving there to help set up Griffith University's Foundation Year in 1975 where he worked to create the then new screen studies and production courses now internationally acknowledged, a series of pioneering new degree and postgraduate programmes that have produced and mentored many of the leading film scholars and film makers in international screen studies today.
He lived and wrote full-time in Hobart, Tasmania with his wife, fashion designer and writer, Felicity Dawson.
He also began his parallel career as a public speaker and theorist on media and film policy issues, lecturing widely in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
While in Canberra he was appointed Art Director for the ground breaking 36 screen audio visual, forerunner of contemporary 'public installation' works, at the Australian Pavilion for Expo '74 in Spokane, Washington.
Dawson continued to work as a writer director, primarily on commercials for clients like Qantas, Nestle, Volvo, as well as for many government election campaigns, creating a new style of "presidential" launch for the Federal Labor Party's successful national campaigns in 1983 and 1985 as well as directing TV commercials for Premier Neville Wran in New South Wales.
With his 1980 Film Australia documentary The Myth Makers,[3] and later the Japan Prize-awarded TV Open Learning series Images of Australia,(Australian Broadcasting Corporation), Dawson opened up debate in the 1990s on national identity and the interconnected effects of literature, painting, cartooning, film, propaganda and the arts to constructing and projecting national self-images.
His regular audiences for these short lecture/film screenings include government ministers, department heads and many film professionals.