Biography

Jonathan Ade is an Emmy and Peabody award-winning director, writer and editor with a deeply-held passion for creating uniquely-held, humanistic narratives.

He earned his BFA in Film Production at Emerson College, where his Senior Thesis film, "Through and Away", won the Jury Prize for Best Film at the National Film Festival for Talented Youth. In the field of comedy, Jonathan was the co-creator of the hit mashup trailer "Brokeback to the Future", an early blueprint for the now-endemic viral video, recently on view at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.

From 2010-2013, Jonathan wrote and directed a series of short films entitled "Meditations", in which each short focuses on an introspective moment of everyday life. His film "Lay in Wait", starring Elizabeth Olin ("Killing Season", Academy Award-winning "God of Love") and Michael Stahl-David ("Cloverfield", "Show Me A Hero") was completed in 2015 and was featured in over twenty film festivals across the world. The 35mm short was Executive Produced by Lucas Neff, star of Raising Hope on Fox.

In 2014, Jonathan expanded his oeuvre when he was selected for a long-term artistic residency at Hub-Bub in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he created site-specific films at the intersection of cinema and traditional installation. That led to a second artistic residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center For The Arts in Nebraska City in March 2015. His third residency, a teaching fellowship at Interlochen Academy for the Arts lasted from January through May, 2016.

Most recently, his career in the field of documentary has led to a series of collaborations with NBC photojournalist Ed Ou, including a piece on the Philippines War on Drugs (with Aurora Almendral) and, most recently, an in-depth look at Policing and Mental Illness in San Antonio (with Kitra Cahana). The latter was awarded a Peabody Award for News in 2020. Another documentary, "The New West Coast Sound," was awarded an LA Area Emmy Award in 2021.
- IMDb mini biography by: Jonathan Ade