Biography

Jonathan Shahan is an Oklahoma-based filmmaker. He began creating home movies with friends in middle school and later joined his high school video news team. Around the same time, he started learning 35mm photography and Photoshop.

After high school, he studied theater at Southwestern Oklahoma State University (SWOSU), where he gained skills in lighting and set construction. He then transferred to the film program at Oklahoma City Community College (OCCC), studying under Academy Award-winning producer Gray Frederickson (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now) and Greg Mellott (Jackie Chan’s First Strike). While there, he produced numerous short films, crewed on local productions, and watched the department grow from a single-camera closet into a 6,000-square-foot sound stage.

In 2010, during his studies at OCCC, Jonathan was hired as Marketing Communications Specialist at Allegiance Credit Union. There, he wrote, shot, directed, and edited all commercials and promotional videos while also serving as the company’s in-house photographer and graphic designer. The credit union, originally located inside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, lost over half its staff in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. During his time there, Jonathan worked closely with the Oklahoma City National Memorial and several survivors.

In 2012, he returned to OCCC’s film department, first as a lab technician and later as a cinematographer and editor. He received a Certificate of Appreciation from the college president for his camerawork on the Emmy-nominated documentaries The Dogs of Lexington and Bassett Tales.

In 2015, Jonathan co-directed the documentary Live Cinema Workshop alongside Cait Brasel. The project involved close collaboration with Oscar-winning director Francis Ford Coppola during the development of his live cinema experiment Distant Vision. The footage was later edited into a 90-minute documentary, which has yet to be released. The delay has been attributed to lengthy negotiations among the filmmakers, studios, schools, and producers. The film is now scheduled for release in 2027. He later founded his own production company and has since directed hundreds of short films, music videos, documentaries, commercials, corporate videos and nonprofit projects..

His five 48-Hour Film Project entries earned over 25 award nominations combined. His 2019 short film InterScape won Best Actress at the Bare Bones Film Festival and was included in the anthology Mono Part Deux, which raised over $800 for the charity End the Backlog. In 2020, after more than a decade in the industry, Jonathan made his feature directorial debut with the horror-comedy Wait!, scheduled for release in 2026.

Today, he primarily works on numerous film sets as a cinematographer or digital imaging technician and teaches video editing at Moore-Norman Technology Center. From 2022 to 2024, he served as technical manager, event coordinator, programmer, and videographer at Oklahoma City’s historic Rodeo Cinema. He also continues to collaborate closely with the Dead Center Film Festival each year.
- IMDb mini biography by: anonymous