Biografia
Jerome Gary is an acclaimed filmmaker and educator, nominated for both an Academy Award and an Emmy. He serves as Chairman of Visionaire Media and the MENA Media Fund, which, in partnership with the US Department of State, invests in media projects across the Middle East and North Africa. The fund currently supports over twenty projects at various stages of development or production. To date, it has produced one feature film and eight pilots; five have progressed to series, with three reaching a second season and one continuing to a third season. His filmography includes the Academy Award-nominated Pumping Iron, Stripper, Old Boyfriends, The Gathering, Life After Death, Generation Iron, and Confessions From A War. His television work encompasses The Russians (TNT), Laughs (HBO), Rebel Highway (Showtime), On the Road in America (three seasons on Sundance and MBC1), American Caravan, Arab Muslim Women (MBC1), and Trading Places.
Gary previously held the position of President of Production at Cinema 5, an independent film studio, from 1978 to 1980, and was President of Visionaire Communications from 1981 to 1986. Between 2000 and 2006, he served as Strategic Director at USC's Institute for Creative Technologies. He has secured over $32 million in federal grants for media and public diplomacy projects and has been extensively involved in work throughout the Middle East since 2004.
In addition to his active career in film and television, Gary spent thirteen years as a senior lecturer in screenwriting and directing at the American Film Institute Center for Advanced Film and Television Studies. He was Chair of the Senior Screenwriting Instruction for seven years and Senior Directing Instructor for three years. He also taught directing at the University of Southern California School of Cinema and Television for a decade and has offered courses in directing, screenwriting, and storytelling at the Los Angeles Film School, Esalen Institute, Yale University, Dartmouth, the University of Hawaii, and numerous international locations. Between 2006 and 2008, he led teams of ten instructors on three visits to Afghanistan, conducting two-week media capacity-building programs in Kandahar, awarding graduation certificates to 138 participants. Since 2018, he has provided storytelling and screenwriting masterclasses to over 1,200 students, filmmakers, and educators in Cairo, Tunis, Rabat (three sessions), Marrakech (two sessions), and Beirut (two sessions). He has also taught storytelling to traumatized children in Kandahar and Kabul.
Gary produced iDiplomacy, a two-day symposium on citizen diplomacy hosted by the Gallup Organization and sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense and Gallup. He has twice represented the Media Committee as spokesperson at the Doha Forum. He has published papers and delivered lectures on "Trauma and Fractured Narrative" in Beirut, Cairo, Rabat, and at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. Additionally, he served as President of the Jury at the Carthage Film Festival and the Rabat Festival des Auteurs.
He graduated with honors in History of the Arts and Letters from Yale University and is a member of both the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Directors Guild of America (DGA). He is married to film director Mary Lambert, and they have a son named Jordan.
