Jonathan Blank is a writer, filmmaker, entrepreneur and creative technologist.

Jonathan's current projects include:

• Reading Kingdom -- an amazing new online reading program (patent pending) based on the legendary work of world-renowned literacy expert, Dr. Marion Blank who, in addition to being Jonathan's mother, is the Director of the Light on Literacy program at Columbia University. The Reading Kingdom takes a revolutionary approach to teaching children how to read using fun-filled, game-like exercises.
• Secrets of Dragon Gate -- a new book (recently sold to Tarcher/Penguin, the premier publisher of mind, body, and spirit titles) which reveals the essence of Dragon Gate Taoism, an 800-year-old system of Chinese philosophy, martial arts, meditation, magic and mysticism. The book brings to light ancient Taoist methods for manifesting health, wealth and happiness and includes information on chi (energy) development, sexual yoga, dream yoga and Taoist magic. "Secrets of Dragon Gate" will be published in March, 2011.
• 420 -- an outrageous comedy. Jonathan and fellow producer, Peter Miller, optioned the script and Jonathan re-wrote it to direct it.

Jonathan is also the founder of Wildform, an award-winning presentation, animation and video software company that created Flix, the first Flash video encoding software which revolutionized the web video landscape. Jonathan eventually sold the Flix product line to On2 Technologies which was subsequently acquired by Google. Today, much of the video that you see on the Internet is encoded with software originally developed by Wildform. Wildform also created Flair -- a very powerful and easy to use multimedia presentation program. In addition to creating consumer software, Wildform has licensed its technology to leading companies such as Sony, Quark, Autodesk, and Adobe. Wildform, working with Google, recently released the first encoder for the new WebM video format.

You can read a sampling of Wildform software reviews here.

Among Jonathan's award-winning and critically acclaimed films are:

• Sex, Drugs & Democracy ("A seductive argument" --Roger Ebert), an award-winning feature-length documentary and art-house hit that played theatrically in over 100 cities and grossed over $1 million. A copy of "Sex, Drugs & Democracy" was also sent to each member of Congress by a wealthy philanthropist interested in stimulating debate.
• Anarchy TV ("A wild, crazy and twisted comedy!" --Jan Wahl of KRON-TV), a feature-length comedy starring Alan Thicke, George Wendt, Jessica Hecht and Dweezil, Ahmet, Moon and Diva Zappa.
• Collecting America ("Fascinating…3 ½ stars" --Joseph Gelmis, New York Newsday), a one-hour documentary on the baseball collecting frenzy in America.
• Karma Express, an award-winning short shown nationally on MTV.
  

You can read a sampling of Jonathan's film reviews here.

In addition, Jonathan has written and sold many articles and screenplays as well as co-authoring another book on Taoist philosophy and meditation, Still as a Mountain, Powerful as Thunder (Shambhala Publications). He is also an avid martial artist with over 20 years experience and currently serves as the Western Liaison for the Shaolin Temple in Los Angeles.

Jonathan received a BA in history, and an MFA in film from Columbia University.

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