Hi. I’m Jason Wishnow. I’ve been painted as a villain of the labor movement in a book called The Schwarzenegger Syndrome: Politics and Celebrity in the Age of Contempt because of some story I told at a film festival about how there was a supermarket strike while we were shooting  Oedipus  and I crossed a picket line to audition vegetables...

I have a thing for the movies (watching, making, and living my life like a poor substitute for them). I’m passionate about storytelling, pushing boundaries, exploring new technologies (at the service of good stories), and spreading ideas.

If we were to meet in person I’d want you to tell me about a film you like and why I ought to see it. If we were on set together I’d want you to have fun. What’s more fun than making movies?

Bio, Long Version:

Jason Wishnow is the filmmaker behind TEDTalks, the Peabody Award winning video series watched over one billion times (even in outer space). Wishnow works at the intersection of film and emerging technologies and has been called an “online-video virtuoso” (New York Times, 2009), the “enfant terrible of digital film” (The Guardian, 2000), and one of the ten most influential digital filmmakers of 1999 (RES Magazine). Prior to joining TED, Wishnow founded one of the first film websites, The New Venue, in the mid-’90s, an entire decade before YouTube. In 2000, Wishnow organized the first handheld/mobile film festival, The Aggressively Boring Film Festival, named after the technical limitations of its time. As a director, Wishnow’s short films and music videos have played on television, in museums, and at over 100 film festivals worldwide including Sundance, Seattle, São Paulo, Hong Kong, and RESFEST. Wishnow’s most recent project is We Are All Radioactive, a crowd-funded, bilingual, episodic documentary series about surfers and fishermen rebuilding coastal Japan after the 2011 tsunami and nuclear meltdown. Wishnow is currently developing and directing narrative film and television projects, and privately consulting about digital video strategy.

Bio, Short Version:

Jason Wishnow makes movies with zombies, unicorns, semen, vegetables, supermodels, and Nobel laureates.

Press clippings and assorted rumors about me (also: “Surviving Sundance on $31”).

Don’t be a stranger, stranger. Say hi. Ask me anything. My email is to the right!

Wieden+Kennedy - Shanghai, China - 7 Dec 2012 at 5pm - Speaker - “Space Travel”

GZDOC International Documentary Film Festival - Guangzhou, China - 4 Dec 2012 at 6:45pm - Panelist