Jean-Michel Brawand is a Swiss-Filipino filmmaker and painter based in Berlin. Raised across London, the Philippines, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Berlin, his multidisciplinary practice spans moving-image, painting, and text—operating across a transnational geography shaped by a lifelong negotiation of cultural and visual identities.

Trained in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, Brawand’s artistic journey began at sixteen with a borrowed Hi-8 camcorder and an analogue camera, initiating a early interest in visual documentation. Influenced by his grandfather, the Filipino filmmaker and screenwriter Chito B. Tapawan, as well as his parents’ extensive archiving of his childhood, Brawand developed a documentary-informed film practice grounded in long-take realism, psychoanalysis, and improvisation. Through initiatives like 'The Blake House workshops', his films blur the lines between truth and fiction, using personal archives and raw human encounters to document the complexities of the human condition.

In 2024, Brawand initiated a concentrated return to painting as an immediate, tactile counterpoint to time-based media. Where film allowed him to work through duration and narrative revelation, painting allows him to process images instantly while retaining the physical evidence of time. Working without preliminary sketches, his painterly process functions like reverse restoration—utilizing layering, scraping, excavation, and material erosion.

Drawing from Coptic and Byzantine iconography, Gnostic theology, outsider art, manga, and childhood memory, Brawand investigates pareidolia and the point before an image is fixed by language. Whether on canvas or screen, his work invites a pluralistic reading, presenting images that resist single interpretations to evoke the mystical within everyday life.

His films and paintings have been presented in festivals and galleries internationally, including in Berlin, London, Barcelona, and Buenos Aires.