About Jonny Meyer
Jonathan “Jonny” Meyer is an artist, Emmy award winning film-maker, and visual storyteller who currently lives in Washington, D.C.
Jonny is a camera person and director of photography. One of his documentary projects recently won him an Emmy and he has been nominated twice for the National News and Documentary Emmy awards. Jonny has also been a director of broadcast content. His creative palette includes still photography, filmmaking and aerial cinematography -- utilizing helicopters and drones. He has been the designer, builder and pilot of robotic rotorcraft aircraft culminating in work for two of the greatest storytelling institutions and repositories in America. Jonny also loves to paddle his Surfski kayak on the Potomac. He has built every bicycle he’s owned, except for his E-bike and bicycles given him by his parents. He is deeply curious about both social systems and mechanical things - and has been known to repeatedly pick up design objects for study and assessment. He is a multi-faceted developer of automated robotic tools for creative and technical execution for artists and craft-people to utilize in his own and other’s folk’s work.
His work includes the Emmy winning Netflix documentary “Poisoned: The Dirty Truth About Your Food”; the Emmy nominated PBS documentary “Who’s Afraid of Nathan Law”; visual effects plates for all nine seasons of the TV drama series “Scandal”; the moving visual-effects plates for the Tom Cruise feature film “American Made,” which is a true story about a troubling American history; and a documentary about Hillary Clinton. In that documentary, he was one of the camera people trusted with filming President Barack Obama in the White House. He also worked on a project for the National Archives documenting President Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office.
He was also the A-Camera operator for several nationally distributed comedy specials. He was once tasked with flying a camera drone inside the Jefferson Reading Room of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., to recreate a shot from the movie “All the President’s Men,” which co-starred Dustin Hoffman and the late great Robert Redford. (The main reading room in the Library of Congress is also the home of a grand mosaic mural of the Roman Goddess Minerva, created by the master American painter and Italian ex-pat Elihu Vedder. Jonny has chosen to frame his Emmy Statue with an overdone and slightly damaged gilded frame, now in need of reconstruction, that once held another of Vedder’s paintings.)
Jonny is a member of the International Cinematographer’s Guild - Local 600.
He sees himself as a person of thoughtful vision – as well as an oral and visual storyteller fascinated by the world. He loves exploring multiple and new perspectives. He is an inventive tinkerer, a fan of blended spirits, a licensed but non-practicing bartender, and sometimes a proud doorman for one of the best speakeasy bars in the District of Columbia. He loves dialog and asking riddles of strangers.
As a teenager, he showed a strong interest in French culture, while interacting with Wolf-hybrid, Alaskan huskies and 4-H horses and goats on his parent’s Northeast Ohio vineyard. Jonny holds both U.S. and Canadian citizenship. He considers himself a citizen of the world – one now choosing to live, love, learn and laugh wherever located. Jonny sees himself as deeply spiritual -- outside the church -- but observant and honoring of nature and indigenous storytellers. His father is a retired journalist, pastor and activist. His mother is a former dressmaker and furrier and now licensed clinical counselor and academic, in-home therapy consultant/researcher. His paternal great grandfather left Kaiser-era Germany to found the psychology department at the University of Missouri. His maternal grandparents were working-class Canadians. His late grandfather Garry spent the bulk of his life building Ford vehicles and serving others, while his grandmother Grace made the best soft-boiled eggs he can remember.
Among Jonny’s most prized possessions are his library card, his lucky nickel, and the American Buffalo shoulder-mount taxidermy affixed to his partner’s wall.
Fun fact: Jonny is a former Vaquero who is deeply attracted to American Spirt, and whose former commercial client were a bunch of “cowboy killers”, in a manner of speaking.