Josh Fox

Josh Fox is an American filmmaker, playwright, theatre director, and outspoken environmental activist whose work has reshaped public discourse around hydraulic fracturing and climate change. Born on August 19, 1972 in New York City, Fox grew up split between the urban landscape of Manhattan and the rural environs of Milanville, Pennsylvania, a contrast that later informed his ecological sensibilities. He attended Columbia University, graduating in 1995 with a theater degree, and briefly studied at Oberlin before transferring, an education that fed his relentless experimentation across stage and screen. His early career unfolded in Chicago’s avant‑garde theatre scene, where he performed alongside Tracy Letts and Michael Shannon at Steppenwolf and trained with Anne Bogart’s SITI Company, mastering Viewpoints and Suzuki techniques. In the late 1990s Fox founded International WOW Company in Chiang Mai, Thailand, directing more than thirty original plays that blended Asian performance traditions with New York experimental drama, earning praise from The New York Times as “one of the most adventurous impresarios of the New York avant‑garde.” The transition to documentary film arrived with Gasland (2010), a seminal investigation of fracking that premiered at Sundance, won the Special Jury Prize, and sparked a worldwide anti‑fracking movement; the film earned an Academy Award nomination and a Primetime Emmy for nonfiction directing. Fox followed with Gasland Part II (2013), How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change (2016), and Awake: A Dream from Standing Rock (2017), each project intertwining personal narrative, scientific testimony, and activist strategy, and repeatedly collecting Environmental Media Association honors. Beyond filmmaking, he has contributed journalism to Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, and AJ+, co‑founded The Solutions Project, and served as a surrogate for Senator Bernie Sanders in 2016, illustrating his belief that art and politics must converge. His recent work, The Truth Has Changed (2021) and The Edge of Nature (2023), examines misinformation, the COVID‑19 pandemic, and the “anthropause,” cementing his reputation as a multidisciplinary storyteller who leverages theater, film, and live performance to mobilize audiences toward ecological justice.