Joshua van Praag Pro

Joshua van Praag is an award-winning director, producer, writer and cinematographer. Van Praag began his career at the age of sixteen in his native Britain, working as a camera trainee on film and television productions. By the age of nineteen he had moved to New York City where he quickly found his way back onto the set, as a lighting technician on independent features. Over the next eight years van Praag travelled the world, working on more than forty feature films under directors such as Martin Scorcese, Bernardo Bertolucci, Wong Kar Wai, and Woody Allen, before finally embarking on his own journey behind the camera. As a director, van Praag's short films have been exhibited in venues as diverse as New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art and the Anthology Film Archives, at the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, and at film festivals like London's Raindance and the New York Independent. As a member of the Media Working Group at Occupy Wall Street, van Praag helped found and create content for the movement’s first video production collective, Occupy TVNY, whose short films were watched by millions of online viewers across the globe. In early 2012, van Praag completed his first feature-length film , 'The Lottery of Birth' - episode one of the forthcoming documentary series, 'Creating Freedom'. A wide ranging and timely analysis of how power is wielded in modern-day democracies, the project is co-directed by painter Raoul Martinez. The cast includes Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Amy Goodman, Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker. Van Praag is now in production on a new feature-length documentary about the role of independent media in contemporary social movements. The film follows a handful of journalists as they deploy the tools of new media to cover the explosive paradigm shift of pro-democracy activism from Cairo to New York.