Josh Stephenson

Joshua Manning Stephenson was born in Florida to a school teacher and lawyer. Raised during the Reagan Administration, he is a graduate of the University of Florida's School of Journalism and has a BA in Film Editing from Columbia College Chicago. His first job out of high school was in television commercial production at the local ABC affiliate WCJB-TV20 where he started in the Creative Services department before moving into broadcast news as a studio camera op and later audio engineer. At age 24, he moved to Chicago and attended film school while working at an adult video store. The next decade was spent concentrating on personal short films (inspired mostly by the works of George and Mike Kuchar) with the occasional freelancing gig in corporate video. He also spent some time as a producer in the underground S.O.V. Chicago horror scene and had a brief stint in pornography as a shooter/cutter for a femdom website. This time spent exploring alternative forms of production in video led to an actual real job opportunity with Full Spectrum Features for the racial identity piece Self-Deportation: The Untold Tale of a Marginal Woman. Around the same time, he was hired to direct a pair of showcase narrative shorts for Kinematic Entertainment and J&R Productions, respectively. He returned to television in 2015, after moving to Louisiana, with a run on the second season of NCIS: New Orleans for CBS. More work on shows and feature films would soon follow including content for AMC, Marvel, Netflix, MTV, and Animal Planet. He married in 2017 and continues to live and work in the city of New Orleans.