JOE DEA DIRECTOR
Emmy-winning director Joe Dea's (pronounced Day) work has been showcased everywhere from the New York Museum of Modern Art to prime time broadcast and cable networks. Dea works primarily in the reality/doc and dramatization/re-creation television genre directing talent and real people in both multi-camera and single camera, field and studio productions.
His career began fresh out of the Hartford Art School with video art shows at New York's The Kitchen, Anthology Film Archives, Global Village, and The Optic Nerve (SF.)
From the New York video art scene, Dea moved to San Francisco to become a founding member and creative force behind Videowest, a groundbreaking comedy/music-video/alternative news production company that pretty much defined music television in the early '80s - at one time producing all of MTV's music news. Dea was an integral creative force behind Videowest’s production of hundreds of TV magazine shows and music videos from 1978 to 1984. It's award-winning weekly series Backstage Pass, Best of Videowest, Rock On and Take Off were released on a variety of broadcast and cable outlets including ABC, BBC, Disney, MTV, Showtime, USA and PBS. During that period, Dea honed his directing skills in comedy and the emerging music video field. Today, much of this early pioneering work is noted in Rolling Stone Magazine’s Top 100 Videos and Rolling Stone’s Music Video Hall of Fame. Music videos for Krokus's Eat the Rich and Screaming in the Night earned Dea his first gold record and were the very first Heavy Metal videos to air in heavy rotation on MTV. His video, Two Triple Cheese for Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen, resides in the permanent collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art.
Dea moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles to work in national television. Since then, he has directed hundreds of hours in genres such as documentary, reality, stunts, comedy sketches, live music, historic & crime dramatic re-creations and animation. His prime-time network specials for NBC and Fox include: Masters of Illusion: The Wizards of Special Effects, and The World’s Greatest Stunts. He has directed many segments for broadcast network, syndicated, and cable network reality series. As Senior Director of the TLC hit A Wedding Story, one of the longest running series on cable, Dea directed the pilot and 48 cinema verite half-hour episodes, shot all over the United States.
PreVis & Storyboards
Throughout his career Dea has designed previs animatics and storyboards for his own productions and for outside projects.
Dea designed the FX storyboards for the feature film Atlas Shrugged.
Fine Art
Also, working as a fine artist, Dea has a second career creating digital paintings on canvas. Dea recently exhibited at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art and the Museum of Neon Art.
Ascension - SpaceX
Dea designed the poster art for Werner Herzog's Oscar nominated
Encounters at the End of the World.
