Biographie
Justin Ambrosino is an American Film Institute graduate, recipient of the Patricia Hitchcock Scholarship, a New York Foundation of the Arts Fellow, Kyoto Filmmaker Lab Fellow, S-AIR Sapporo Artist-in-Residence, T.O.K.A.S. Tokyo Artist-in-Resident and BiFan Fantastic Film School Participant. Ambrosino's projects in-development have been selected as an It Project for the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Project Market, the Pitchbox at the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival Genre Market and the TorinoFilmLab NEXT Program.
As writer & director, Ambrosino's films have played at festivals worldwide, including "The 8th Samurai" starring Eijiro Ozaki, which qualified for the Oscars after winning the Grand Prix at the L.A. International Short Film Festival, and screened during Akira Kurosawa's 100th Anniversary Tour. Another short, "Hungry for Love", screened at P.B.S. Online, starred non-actors from Sapporo, Japan, and won the Grand Prix at the Shaded View on Fashion Film Festival, presented by Jean Paul Gaultier, as well as Best Hokkaido Short at the Sapporo Shorts Fest, presented by Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi. His short "First Samurai in New York", starring Maho Honda, Gabe Fazio and Mike Houston, is in-development as a T.V. Series. He has directed commercials for the Kansai International Airport, as well as music videos, including Running on Empathy, starring Steve Guttenberg for the Japanese band Mishmash * Aimee Isobe.
Ambrosino has been a film festival judge, grant panelist for the New York Foundation of the Arts, and has taught filmmaking workshops at the University of New Orleans, the Ghetto Film School in the Bronx and the Institute of European Design on Sardegna. He began as a film journalist for IONCinema, covering the New York Indie scene, meanwhile working as a production assistant on the sets of films directed by Martin Scorsese, Sidney Lumet, Mel Brooks, Andrew Niccol and Wayne Kramer, and making 16mm shorts in his spare time. Latter of which got him into the American Film Institute to receive his MFA in Directing.
