Jon Plant was born in Sheffield in the North of England, spending much of his later life in and around London.
He exhausted ambitions to be a pastor, teacher, lawyer, architect, journalist and marine-biologist before completing a master’s degree in chemistry. In his early twenties, Jon finally discovered the passion for filmmaking he has resolutely pursued ever since. This spared him a future of perpetual dilettantism, but further delayed a diagnosis of ADHD that — in hindsight — should probably have been caught sooner.
Jon’s first short film, BREAK-IN, garnered awards for editing and cinematography, racked up half a million views online, and won him a place to study directing at the UK’s prestigious National Film and Television School.
While there, an overly-ambitious attempt to squeeze a multi-thread newsroom drama into the space of ten minutes should probably have taught Jon the virtue of restraint. Fortunately, he never learned his lesson and his graduation short, THE ESCAPIST — a non-linear 1920s period drama that includes, among other things, a steam train, a West End theatre, and a death-defying straitjacket escape — was screened at several international film festivals.
Since graduating, Jon has honed his craft on various television and feature screenplays. He was a finalist two years running for the BBC’s Greenlight program with migrant thriller OKSIJAN and mind-bending dementia odyssey I’M NOT HOME. He advanced to latter stages of network screenwriting fellowships with spec episodes of STRANGER THINGS and WESTWORLD and recently completed the pilot script for MYTOPIA: a dystopian sci-fi series about weaponised disinformation and a post-privacy world.
Jon recently immigrated to the USA as a permanent resident. A reel of his directing work can be seen on his website www.jonplantdirector.co.uk
