Jon Shenk is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and a founder of Actual Films in San Francisco. He recently produced, directed, and photographed THE BEGINNING, a cinema verité documentary about the making of STAR WARS: EPISODE 1, THE PHANTOM MENACE, which was released on the PHANTOM MENACE DVD. His films DARK ROOMS and NAKED TO THE WORLD have aired on PBS and have won many awards. He has field-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 produced two documentaries for the George Lucas Educational Foundation’s series Teaching in the Digital Age. Jon 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 Masters in Documentary Filmmaking from Stanford University in 1995.
