Director/Producer
Josh Murphy is a director and producer and co-founder of Liars & Thieves!, which is a San Francisco-based production company. His film career began with the award-winning UNPARALLELED action-sports documentary series and now spans commercial, branded content, television, and feature film. He co-produced and was the second unit director for the feature film THE RIVER WHY that premiered at the 2010 Dallas AFI Film Festival and won the Gerald Hirschfeld, ASC Best Cinematography at the 2010 Ashland Independent Film Festival and starring Zach Gilford, Amber Heard, Academy Award Winner William Hurt and Academy Award Nominee Kathleen Quinlan. He produced the short film ALONE TIME starring Rose Hemingway that premiered at the Phoenix Film Festival 2013 and was awarded a Vimeo Staff Pick 2013, Best of Vimeo 2013 and has been viewed over 1 million times on Vimeo. He produced the elevated genre film HERE ALONE that won Best Narrative Feature at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival and was awarded the Empire State Filmmakers Award and is distributed by Vertical Entertainment. He co-produced the 2018 multi-award winning feature documentary THE PUSH that was acquired by Gravitas Ventures and is about the first spinal cord injured athlete to push himself to the South Pole. Most recently, Josh directed the feature documentary film ARTIFISHAL that was commissioned by Patagonia founder and owner Yvon Chouinard, and premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival where it was a finalist for the Tribeca X Prize. It has played at over 300 film festivals and grassroots screenings and will be available in Fall of 2019 on Amazon Prime, iTunes, and YouTube.
Dr. Murphy was the Executive Producer of Mustang Ranch: Labor of Love for HDNet and his broadcast productions have been featured on PBS, CBS, ESPN, CMT, OLN, VH1, G4, VS, and FOX. He is the recipient of North American Snow Sports Journalist Association’s Bill Berry Award for Modern Media and the Harold Hirsch Award for Film and Broadcast, and was a finalist for the San Francisco Film Society’s Kenneth Rainin Foundation Filmmakers Grant for the feature film NORTH. Commercial clients include Intel, Avaya, Thompson Reuters, The North Face, GoPro, Clif Bar, Theranos, Patagonia, Outdoor Research, Gilead, Nintendo, Funny or Die, PLS, Sunsweet, Health Mart/McKesson, Brawny, The Clorox Company, Bloomberg Foundation, SanDisk, and Volvo.
Prior to film, Josh was trained as a natural resource scientist and fisheries biologist with degrees from University of Vermont Rubenstein School of Natural Resources and Humboldt State University. He focused on fisheries and river restoration, managed an on-campus teaching fish hatchery in graduate school, and worked on a terrestrial fish farm in Ireland. His childhood idol was Jacques Cousteau, and through him he discovered a love for film and the environment.