Jonathan Culp (born March 22, 1971) is a Canadian underground filmmaker, musician, media artist and writer. They are best known for the features Grilled Cheese Sandwich and Taking Shelter, and for their work in the genre of found footage collage. History Early life Culp was raised on a farm in Vineland Station, Ontario. Their grandparents (who ran a film distribution company, Carman Educational Associates) worked with and boarded German animation pioneer Lotte Reiniger, whom Culp met at age 3, their first exposure to filmmaking. Culp received a degree in Radio and Television Arts at Ryerson University. Between semesters they wrote and directed their first short 16mm drama, Bark, featuring friend and former bandmate Ailsa Craig. Performance art, TVAC and early short videos While employed as a post-production supervisor at Vision TV, Culp became involved with Symptom Hall, a free-form performance arts space that operated from 1993 to 1998. There they would perform and otherwise contribute to several ambitious ‘happenings’. Culp would produce an audio documentary on Symptom Hall in 2016. In 1996 Culp premiered a 16mm experimental short film, Jonathan Culp!, at The Cameron House, Toronto, during a CD release party for their punk band Loogan Bin. Culp formed the Toronto Video Activist Collective (TVAC) with a number of other leftist videographers in 1997. TVAC documented street protests for several years and produced the VideoActive compilation video series on VHS. The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty’s direct action protests became the subject of several short documentaries by Culp between 1999 and 2005. In 1998, while hitch-hiking across Canada, Culp attended Victoria’s Antimatter Festival to premiere Chew It, Somalia! - a found-footage collage film made from 16mm films bought at a library sale. Culp went on to work predominantly in the collage style, authoring many films and videos most notably the feature-length Taking Shelter. Longer films and recent work Grilled Cheese Sandwich (2005) Culp’s first feature was shot on video in 2003 with a budget of $12,000. Largely cast with local teens, it satirized Culp’s experiences in the social justice movement, within an unflattering portrait of fictionalized small town Grimsville, ON. It Can Happen Here (2006) A 47 minute ‘anti-documentary’ essay on the themes of art, activism and madness. The project grew out of an exploration of the Weyburn Mental Hospital, where Culp's great-grandfather Russell Carman had been incarcerated from 1936 to 1962. Taking Shelter (2014) An ambitious feature-length collage project, seven