Editor Justin Nathanson

Justin Forest Nathanson was born in Mount Sinai hospital in New York City on July 22, 1973, at 3:08 in the morning.  He shares a humble birthday with a Pope, artists Edward Hopper and Alexander Calder, author Tom Robbins, actor Albert Brooks, musician George Clinton, game show host Alex Trebek and baseball player Sparky Lyle.
 
Justin grew up in Brooklyn, New York, in a Victorian neighborhood called Prospect Park South. His father is a landscape architect and painter, and his mother is an art collector and a recently retired Director of Graphics for the City of New York. Together, they also owned and ran two retail stores in Greenwich Village and SOHO, a Latin American and Haitian folk art gallery and a high-end retail home and garden store.  While most of Nathanson’s friends spent their holidays in summer camp or resorts, Justin was trekking in Machu Picchu, The Galapagos Islands and other far-out places with his parents collecting indigenous art from small villages all over South and Central America.

At age 9 Justin entered the ‘Young Peoples Program’ at The Lee Strasberg Theater Institute, studying ‘The Method’ for many years. This led to many Off Broadway plays, Indy Movies and commercials. When it was time to think about college, while in Edward R. Murrow High School (see the school in Seinfeld, The Cosby Show and others) Justin had a chance to direct the senior video yearbook, and it was then he thought that he would like to be behind the camera as well.

At Justin’s first year of film school at the School of Visual Arts in New York City (SVA), he worked as a Best Boy on the film Pawns which finished 4th place at the National Student Academy Awards.  A year later, while only 19 years old and in his second year of film school, on a dare from his professor, Justin raised over $75,000 to produce and direct his first motion picture BURN. BURN was the 26-year David Lynch-style full-length epic of a Rabbi and a Priest who are identical twins, separated at age 6, living in the opposite ends of small town America unbeknownst to each other. Just your average feel-good movie of the year! 35 production days, 3 states and 80 reels later, of all the companies that could attach themselves to BURN, it was Linda Ellerbee at Nickelodeon (NickNews) who saw what Justin was doing, provided the free AVID editing for the film and got Emmy Award winning Greg Paine to teach Justin the art of the edit.

At that point, cutting together hours and hours of raw super-16mm film into a story, Justin knew that he would forever be an editor. The film was released in New York at the former church and nightclub, Limelight, with an audience of over 1,000. Soon after, getting his hands on the first-ever release of Apple’s Final Cut Pro, Justin spent every waking second acquiring footage to cut and practice with.

Another year later, still in film school, Justin was asked to produce Mr. Paine’s comedy feature, Babyshakes and the Return of Mac Daddy, a story about a failed writer/bike messenger delivering shady packages to interesting people all over New York City.  The film did well, won festival awards, and had a limited release.

Over the next few years Justin produced, directed and edited commercials, films, television shows, and music videos in Los Angeles, Miami and New York.  Some of those projects include the Macy’s July 4th live fireworks broadcast, 25th anniversary Rutles DVD, commercials for Estee Lauder, Gatorade, Jeep/Wrangler, Nabisco, music videos for Metallica, Hole and The Black Crowes, TV work for E! with The Howard Stern Show, Comedy Central’s Beat The Geeks, The VH-1 Master Producer series, Court TV’s Stories from the Innocence Project, Fox Sports Networks Best Damn Sports Show, Period, an A&E documentary series for Avon,  the feature films Blue Vinyl, Melting Planet, and the raw Watch This documentary series for the Glass Bead Collective, among many others.  

For Entertainment Tonight, Justin spent a month in Lisbon, Portugal shooting/documenting Ford Models’ ‘Supermodel of the Year awards, and six months in Hawaii shooting surf contests for ESPN. Justin also directed and edited 3 episodic Internet-streamed shows, including DJ Booth, a how-to DJ show with the foremost DJs of the world, Bachelor Chef, an early ‘Martha Stewart for college-aged kids,’ and This or That, an irreverent man-on-the-street interview show. 

Justin also created Busman’s Holiday, a 22-minute documentary on his father and a garden he designed and planted on St. Bart’s, which accumulated over 500,000 Internet views in 2001. Then, commissioned by Phillip Morris, he created 6 art installations over a year where he filmed, created and designed a multi-media show that became part of the space in art galleries, nightclubs and the Brooklyn Museum. 

When Justin moved to Charleston in early 2005, he was hired as the lead editor for a network television teen-drama show, reaching 97 million homes and Solutions with Jill, a one-minute home repair segment that broadcasts daily during ABC’s morning news with Nina Sossoman.  Justin also edited segments for NASCAR, Animal Tails with Jack Hanna, Exploration with Richard Wiese, and The Home Team, among others.

In early 2006, Justin put together a super creative team and launched the nonprofit ChasDOC, inc. and The Charleston Documentary Film Festival, to inspire real, local stories to be told from South Carolina through documentary film and to have an annual festival where the best environmental and human rights documentaries can be programmed.

Charleston Documentary Film Festival