Writer, filmmaker, and musical instrument repair technician Joseph Johnston made his first movie at the age of 11, an industrial espionage thriller that continues to play to excited crowds in his mother’s living room every Christmas. In 1996 he was nominated for the Irene Ryan Acting Award from the Kennedy Center for The Performing Arts/American College Theatre Festival. He earned a Bachelor’s Degree with Departmental Honors in Theatre from Alma College in 1997. After spending a decade forming an independent record label as an outlet for his avant-blues recordings, experimenting with lost and found sound and starting a family, he began a pursuit of a new wave of motion picture storytelling in 2007. His short dramatic and experimental films have been honored with jury and audience awards at numerous festivals throughout the country, including the Queens World Film Festival in New York and the East Lansing Film Festival in Michigan. Moving in a literary direction in 2010, his first video literature piece was published by the Iron Horse Literary Review in 2013. He resides in metro Detroit where he continues to write and experiment with digital video.
Current projects include a full length play to workshop in Brooklyn in the fall of 2014 and a documentary about the history of boxing in Detroit. |