Joshua Seftel is a 2017 Peabody Awards Finalist for his Vox series Secret Life of Muslims. The set of timely and poignant documentaries has had more than 30 million views since Election Day. His 2016 award-winning documentary The Many Sad Fates of Mr. Toledano, produced with Morgan Spurlock and Steve Tisch, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and was one of the most viewed New York Times Op-Docs of the year.
Seftel's first foray into comedy, Breaking the Mold, gained cult status on the film festival circuit and caught the attention of filmmaker Alexander Payne, who championed him as a director. Seftel went on to direct the political satire War, Inc. starring John Cusack, Marisa Tomei, Hilary Duff, Joan Cusack, and Ben Kingsley which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Seftel began his career in documentaries at age 22 with his Emmy-nominated Lost and Found about Romania’s orphaned children. The film led to the American adoption of thousands of Romanian orphans. He followed this with several films including the political campaign film Taking on the Kennedys, selected by Time Magazine as one of the “ten best of the year”; the underdog sports film The Home Team which premiered at SXSW, and the behind-the-scenes film about Annie’s Broadway revival It’s the Hard Knock Life which the New York Times called “delightful.”
Seftel also directed the Emmy-winning series Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and is a contributor to Ira Glass' This American Life, CBS Sunday Morning, and The New York Times. In his free time, he co-hosts a comedic web series with his 80-year-old mother about which The New York Times wrote, "the word 'droll' seems as if it were invented for these two." Seftel lives in Brooklyn with his wife, filmmaker Erika Frankel, and their daughter Lillian.