Unreasonable Mentors
Jason Wishnow
The Filmmaker Behind TED Talks; Producer, Director, Storyteller
Jason is an Unreasonable Mentor. Jason was part of Project Literacy Lab 2017, and has advised over 13 Unreasonable companies.
Jason Wishnow is the filmmaker behind TED Talks, the Peabody Award winning video series watched over one billion times (even in outer space). Wishnow works at the intersection of film and emerging technologies and has been called “no stranger to difficult shoots” (Wired UK, 2014), an “online-video virtuoso” (New York Times, 2009), the “enfant terrible of digital film” (The Guardian, 2000), and one of the ten most influential digital filmmakers of 1999 (RES Magazine). Prior to joining TED, Wishnow founded one of the first film websites, The New Venue, in the mid-’90s, an entire decade before YouTube. In 2000, Wishnow organized the first handheld/mobile film festival, The Aggressively Boring Film Festival, named after the technical limitations of its time. As a director, Wishnow’s short films and videos have played on television, in museums, and at over 100 film festivals worldwide including Telluride, Sundance, Seattle, São Paulo, and Hong Kong. Wishnow’s most recent is a controversial sci-fi film made in China: The Sand Storm (沙尘暴) starring the renowned, tortured artist Ai Weiwei.