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Born in New York City, Townsend attended the Choate School, Bennington College and the San Francisco Art Institute. He worked in print advertising in New York City before securing his first position on a movie, All That Jazz (1979), as the production assistant of Production Designer Philip Rosenberg. He assisted Production Designers Pato Guzman and Santo Loquasto before being asked to design his first feature, a film for German television directed by Peter Lilienthal and starring Joe Pesci called Dear Mr. Wonderful (1982). Townsend continued to work as a production designer for such directors as Martin Scorsese, John Sayles, John Schlesinger (on Pacific Heights (1990) for a visual consultant credit), and Paul Mazursky, while pursuing various writing, directing and scoring projects. Townsend won a shared Emmy for his scripts for the first season of Nickelodeon's Rugrats (1991), has directed commercials (for which he won a Clio in 1987), and is the author of the the 3-second music cue that plays during the Gracie Films production logo at the end of The Simpsons (1989) and other shows. Townsend married Patrice Elaine Collins in 1993 and moved to the Pacific Northwest soon after. Their son Wiley Townsend is a character animator, and they have a daughter Sadie as well. Townsend lectures occasionally on film and education, and developed a radical program for digital filmmakers called The Filmmakers Boot Camp. Under the Now What Creative banner, Townsend produced the multimedia components of book/video/web hybrid projects for PC Studio, including the Patrick Carman's Skeleton Creek (2009), Patrick Carman's Trackers (2010) and Patrick Carman's Dark Eden (2011) series. He has provided brand management and marketing services for various organizations in the Pacific Northwest, and designed a cutting-edge teaching/production/event facility for the Walla Walla Public Library called CrewSpace. In the fall of 2015, Townsend began serving as the Careers in Media & Entertainment Instructor for the Southeast Area Technical Skills Center in Walla Walla, Washington. In 2022, Townsend retired, and in 2023 he and his wife moved to Bellingham, Washington. In 2024, Townsend produced Not Invincible (2024), a short film based on a song he wrote, under the name GUFFY, inspired by his experiences as a teacher of high school students.
