Tony E. Valenzuela

Tony E. Valenzuela is an award-winning filmmaker and the founder of BlackBoxTV, a genre entertainment studio and YouTube channel dedicated to original series, short films and immersive VR/360 experiences. Tony was born in Sacramento and raised fifty miles outside Los Angeles in Fontana, California. He began his entertainment career in 1995 when he signed with BMG Music Publishing as a songwriter. While living in Munich, Tony performed throughout Europe as a recording artist before returning to the U.S. in 1998 and pursuing work as an art director. He designed the original Veronica Mars key art for UPN before joining CBS as a Creative Director and winning a Promax Award for his work. In 2008, Tony wrote and directed 2009: A True Story, a dystopian drama that was nominated for Best Dramatic Web Series at the first-annual Streamy Awards and was featured by legendary horror director, Wes Craven during his Halloween 2008 YouTube Takeover. The following year, he was tapped by EQAL to helm Harper's Globe, the thirteen-episode web series companion to the CBS television drama, Harper's Island which he directed in collaboration with Island's creator/producer John Turteltaub (National Treasure). Tony's next directing project, the Sprite-sponsored mixed reality series Green Eyed World won the 2010 Webby Award for Best Use of Social Media. By 2010, Tony had directed three high-profile web series and in August of that year, he launched his own YouTube channel - BlackBoxTV along with its signature horror anthology BlackBoxTV Presents. In 2012, he partnered with YouTube Originals to create and produce a slate of programming for BlackBoxTV that included a collaboration with C.S.I. Creator, Anthony E. Zuiker and the anthology series Silverwood, which Tony co-produced with Wes Craven's long-time producing protegee, Carly Feingold. As creator of BlackBoxTV, Tony has won Streamy Awards for Best Writing, Best Drama Channel and Best Drama Series for BlackBoxTV Presents, which Variety recognized as the longest-running online drama in 2016. In 2014, Tony directed and co-wrote the supernatural drama, Versions of Elloise in collaboration with Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro, Legendary Entertainment and YouTube Space LA. His next project was directing the pilot episode of the YouTube Red reality competition series, Fight of the Living Dead, which Valenzuela executive produced and distributed through BlackBoxTV from 2015-2016. Later that year, Valenzuela was recruited by New Form - the digital studio co-founded by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, to create, write and direct The Fourth Door, a supernatural good versus evil drama series starring Joey Graceffa and High School Musical actress Monique Coleman. The Fourth Door debuted in October, 2015 and received honors at Marseille Web Fest and the Raindance Film Festival. In early 2016, he launched the virtual reality series BlackBoxTV Presents: 360\Horror. He directed nine episodes of the series' first season, which included collaborations with Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema. The next year Tony's work in VR and 360 filmmaking earned him the inaugural Streamy Award for "Best Immersive Storyteller." Tony's feature-length directorial debut, The Axe Murders of Villisca - which Austin Chronicle film critic Richard Whittaker called "an elegant melding of teen angst and supernatural horror that is as much The Breakfast Club as Sometimes They Come Back," premiered at the LA Film Festival in June, 2016 and was acquired for both theatrical and VOD distribution by IFC Midnight and Netflix in 2017. In 2018, Serial Box acquired the rights to produce Silverwood: The Door, a scripted audio series and eBook based on Tony's 2012 Silverwood web series. Tony's second feature film as a director, The F*ck Just Happened? will be released in 2019.