Having first established himself as photographer and sculptor, with solo exhibitions in both mediums, John W. Rutland’s desire to tell stories through a camera lens quickly evolved into a passion for cinematography.

To further his strengths as a visual storyteller, John earned a BFA in Film Production from the University of Central Florida and an MFA in Cinematography from the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. While attending AFI, he received the prestigious Tom Yoda Scholarship and was cinematographer on the Thesis Film, TRACES, which beat out all features and shorts to win the Best Cinematography prize at the Beverly Hills Film Festival. John has also been a guest lecturer at The Center for Creative Media, the mvwire.com music video conference, Southeastern University and the University of New Orleans.

Post AFI, John has comfortably navigated between the commercial, narrative and unscripted television worlds always striving to find the most compelling images to tell a story. In television, John has been director of photography on shows for many networks including WE, Spike, G4, Animal Planet, HGTV, ITV, Food Network, Bravo and Discovery. As a narrative cinematographer, his films have screened at some of the top film festivals in the world including The Berlin International Film Festival, Tribeca, Sydney Film Festival, and The Hamptons International Film Festival.

Most recently, the LA based cinematographer shot the feature film, LOVELY MOLLY, an intensely emotional thriller co-written and directed by Eduardo Sanchez, director of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. LOVELY MOLLY was accepted into the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival and premiered there on September 14th, 2011.