Jonathan Scott Chinn has worked in the entertainment business since he was a child. He made his stage debut at the age of 5, in a regional theater production of The Music Man, and continued to perform professionally in theater, commercials, and the outer fringes of television through his teenage years. In the early 90s, he joined several other ambitious students to found Spotlight Youth Theater, a performing arts organization in his hometown of Oklahoma City.
While attending The University of Tulsa, Scott began to focus on directing plays and musicals on educational and professional stages, producing live arts events in clubs, and creating very strange and very earnest performance pieces with Tulsa Experimental Theater, another troupe he founded. Scott also worked for several years at Tulsa Public Radio, as local host of Morning Edition and producer of StudioTulsa, the award-winning arts and current affairs interview program.
After moving to New York City in 2001, Scott began working in advertising and fell in love with the art and craft of filmmaking. On and off over the past 15 years, Scott has produced campaigns for a wide variety of clients, from intimate documentaries to complex special-effects extravaganzas and a lot of things in between. He has produced work for Google, Prudential, Hennessy, General Motors, Smirnoff, Mercedes-Benz, Kraft Foods, and UNICEF, among many others. His spots have won One Show Pencils, Cannes Gold Lions, and AICP awards.
Simultaneously, Scott has set aside time for personal directing projects, making shorts and Web films with his company Charred Oak Films as well as music videos for Ladycop, Royksopp, and others. His feature directorial debut, The Widowers, played festivals in 2014, winning a few awards along the way, and is now available on iTunes, Amazon, and other platforms. He is currently developing several other film projects from original screenplays.