John D. Sutter (M.F.A., University of Utah) is an assistant professor of environmental media at the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. He also is part of the leadership team for the university’s Center for Science Communication Research. Sutter is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and climate journalist with more than 15 years of experience making sense of the biggest environmental issues of our time. His work has won the prestigious Livingston Award for Young Journalists, the IRE Award, the Edward R. Murrow Award, the Peabody Award, and the Foreign Press Association media award, and he has received two EMMY nominations—one for new approaches to documentary and the other for environmental reporting.

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Currently, he is directing an independent feature called BASELINE (working title), which follows three children growing up on the frontlines of the climate crisis between 2020 and 2050. He also is the producer of PLANET A, directed by Emelie Mahdavian, which follows a woman-led group of glaciologists on their final trip to the ice shelf at the Thwaites "doomsday glacier" in West Antarctica.
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He is a former Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and a former Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. His work has been supported by the National Geographic Society, the Sundance Institute, Sandbox Films, the Catapult Film Fund, and the National Science Foundation. Sutter spent more than a decade on staff at CNN, where he covered climate and human rights issues, most recently as a senior investigative reporter and climate contributor. Before Oregon, he was the inaugural Ted Turner Visiting Professor of Environmental Media at The George Washington University.