John Paskievich was born of Ukrainian parents in a displaced persons camp in Austria in the aftermath of World War II. While still a child he and his parents moved to Canada. He lives in Winnipeg.

Paskievich is an alumnus of the University of Winnipeg. After graduation he took a cheap camera with him on an extended trip to Europe where he discovered the  peculiar pleasure of looking through a view finder and putting a rectangle around things. On returning to Canada, he studied film and photography at Ryerson University.

Over his career as a film maker and photographer Paskievich has produced a body of work which Maclean’s Magazine has described as “poignant, funny, angry by turns, it brims with rare compassion”.

His films have focused on a diverse range of humanity that includes an immigrant grocer and his daughter, Inuit carvers in Baffin Island, Roma in Slovakia, Russian Old Believers living in Northern Alberta, people who stutter, and Winnipeg inner-city high school students and their teacher who form an after hours storytelling class.

These and other films have won numerous awards and have been screened at festivals, theatres and on television in Canada and around the world.

Paskievich’s still photography has been exhibited in numerous galleries and published in several books including A Place Not Our Own (Queenston House 1977, 1978), Waiting for the Ice Cream Man…a prison journal (Converse 1978), A Voiceless Song (Lester & Orpen Dennys 1983), The North End (University of Manitoba Press 2007) and The North End Revisited (University of Manitoba Press 2017).  According to The Globe and Mail, Paskievich “has a magical ability to pluck the perfect moment from the vanishing collisions of time and place. There’s tremendous depth in these photos, and a humour that never fades.”