Independent Productions

Description: 

Joe Winston grew up in Chicago, earned a B.A. from Yale University in 1988. He’d been filming movies on Super-8mm film since age fourteen, and after college he returned to Chicago to begin his film and television career.

From 1989 to 1993 he produced and hosted a documentary TV series, This Week in Joe's Basement. This quirky, iconoclastic show quickly transcended its venue on Chicago public access cable to become a critical and popular success.

It won two local cable TV awards and was featured in the Chicago Tribune, Reader, New City, NBC's Today, Jenny Jones, MTV’s Day in Rock, BBC’s World of Wonder, PBS's Image Union, and The 90s.

Joe’s Basement became so notorious that when Saturday Night Live’s “Wayne’s World” skit was made into a movie, the Chicago Tribune assigned Joe to interview star Mike Myers.

In 1996, Winston produced and directed The Burning Man Festival, which won rave reviews, festival prizes, and sold to European television and domestic home video. In 1998, he produced a sequel, Burning Man: Just Add Couches. Both films are available together on DVD.

The Minute of Fame Booth was invented by Anton Kast, Dan Margulies and Joe Winston in the summer of 1994. They placed it in the lobby of an Organic Theater production which was based on This Week in Joe’s Basement. The booth, which allows users to videotape themselves in total privacy, has toured to galleries and festivals around Chicago and the Burning Man Festival.

Keep returning to these pages for new and startling visions from Ow Myeye Productions.