Biography

Jay Red Hawk has been involved in the film industry since the age of 16. His first small speaking part was a Sunn Pictures film entitled Inside Adam Swit where he played a tough kid in a detention room brandishing a switchblade. "Hey kid... shut up!" were his first lines. In High School Drama class he was in several lead roles including Romeo in Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet. He went on to do some theater work in the Twin Cities, including the lead role in the play Songcatcher at the History Theater in St. Paul in which he performed nightly all summer. He received excellent reviews.

He had parts in other plays at the World Theater, F. Scott Fitzgerald Theater, performed spoken word at First Avenue Theater, was a soloist with the Minnesota Orchestra in 1995 and around the mid 90's, started to get a lot of documentary work as well as some indie film parts. He has worked with directors Oliver Stone (The Doors) Sarah Pennman (Nokomis) Kristian Berg (Dakota Exile), Seth Eastman (Painting the Dakota), Chris Eyre (Skins) and Oliver Tuthill (Wounded Heart: Pine Ridge and the Sioux).

Besides acting, Jay has done many numerous jobs on movie, commercial and TV sets including production assistant, second boom operator, language consultant, set decorator, art department, stunt driver, stunt fighting, horse wrangler, stunt rider, Primitive American Plains weapons expert, cultural consultant, and horse archery expert and consultant.

He has been in two Best Buy commercials, on PBS on a dozen occasions including History Detectives: Calf Creek Episode and recently was in the third installment of America: The Story of Us on the History Channel, which received the highest rating of any show on that network in their history. Most recently, Jay returned victorious from LA as a featured guest and weapons expert on Spike TV's popular show, Deadliest Warrior - second season episode (Comanche vs. Mongol ) where he set several records on the show for horse archery and the fastest single handed weapons attack in the shows history, beating out Ninjas, Navy S.E.A.L.S., Commandoes and knife experts from around the world.

Jay has been involved in and helped to found four non-profit organizations over the past decade, including having worked for Kevin Costner in 2002 and 2003 on the Tatanka sculpture in Deadwood, South Dakota. Jay has worked with youth from all of the nine reservations in South Dakota to keep alive the tradition of plains horse archery and traditional bow making. In 2003 he was the first man in over 100 years to hunt a buffalo off horseback using a sinew-backed bow and stone-point arrows. (National Geographic May 2004). He is the South Dakota state organizer for the national organization Fathers 4 Justice and the Executive Director of Project 28 and the Director of the P.H.A.A. (Plains Horse Archery Association).
- IMDb mini biography by: Bluewood Films, LLC