ABOUT

I’m a Jackson Wild and Webby Award-winning filmmaker, journalist, and public programs producer whose work has earned three Vimeo Staff Picks and screened at festivals including Wild & Scenic, the International Wildlife Film Festival, Other Worlds Austin, and the Jackson Wild Media Awards.

Over the past decade, I’ve created original media for Popular Science (where I was the Head of Video, Editorial & Branded), PBS Digital Studios, NATURE on PBS, Science Friday, Pioneer Works, Columbia Climate School, Wildlife Conservation Society, National Park Service, Dreyfus Foundation, Museum of the Moving Image, Quanta Magazine, Thrillist, American Masters, New-York Historical Society, The Guardian, PBS NewsHour, and a bunch of other public media shows. My YouTube strategy for Popular Science built an audience of over 100,000 subscribers and generated millions of impressions. If you add up all of my videos, I have over 20 million views.

Beyond filmmaking, I’ve served as a National Park ranger, designed and taught graduate science communication curricula at UNC Charlotte, guest-lectured at NYU, and produced live stage programming for major cultural institutions like Museum of the Moving Image and Pioneer Works.

SOME RANDOM FACTS

• For History Detectives, I located and authenticated the lost Fender Stratocaster Bob Dylan played when he "went electric" at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. It became the series' highest-rated episode, and the guitar later sold at auction for nearly nearly a million dollars. It’s a crazy story that you should definitely ask me about sometime.

• For an American Masters film on Woody Guthrie, I produced a crowdsourced music project collecting covers of "This Land Is Your Land." Singer Bonnie "Prince" Billy submitted a rendition wearing a ski mask, helping make it PBS’s most successful UGC campaign at the time.

• In 2014, The Guardian named my Tumblr publication The American Guide one of the best independent digital travel magazines.

• My Amazon expedition with the Field Museum began with a military helicopter extraction from a cockfighting ring that spends half the year submerged underwater.

Drop me a line at thomas.r.mcnamara@gmail.com and say hello. I’m available to direct, edit, and shoot, as well as produce live events, consult, and teach. Click on work with me to learn more about collaborating and my camera package.

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