Jon Shenk
Director
Jon Shenk is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, cinematographer, and a founder of Actual Films in San Francisco. He co-directed Afghanistan: Hell of a Nation for PBS’s Wide Angle series, and is currently producing New Heroes, a series for PBS about social entrepreneurs. He produced, directed, and photographed The Beginning, a cinema-verité documentary about the making of Star Wars: Episode I, The Phantom Menace, which was released on the Phantom Menace DVD. He has produced and photographed documentaries for MTV’s True Life series about high school football in Texas and about the culture surrounding the drug MDMA (Ecstasy). He also has produced documentaries for the George Lucas Educational Foundation’s series Teaching in the Digital Age. Actual Films is currently producing The Rape of Europa, a three-part series for PBS about the fate of fine art during Third Reich and World War II. Jon also works as a freelance documentary cinematographer for PBS, National Geographic, A&E, Bravo, CBS, NBC, and the BBC. He also worked as assistant editor on Cadillac Desert, a PBS series by Jon Else about the history of the struggle for water in the American West. He earned his master's in documentary filmmaking from Stanford University in 1995.