John Hunter Nolan

Hunter Nolan is a documentary filmmaker, cinematographer, and director whose credits span some of the most recognized documentary work of the past decade, including the most-watched film in National Geographic history, the best-selling documentary in iTunes history, multiple Sundance premieres, an Oscar-nominated feature, and two Emmy-nominated productions. His films have appeared on Netflix, National Geographic, Hulu, Discovery, MSNBC, and Apple TV, collectively reaching billions of viewers across more than 190 countries. He has captured stories on all seven continents and in all fifty states, and the films he has helped make have contributed to federal environmental vetoes, international species protections, shifts in global dietary patterns, and the advancement of Indigenous sovereignty and community-led conservation.

Hunter's career began with Oscar-winning director Louie Psihoyos on Racing Extinction, a multi-year undercover investigation into the illegal wildlife trade and the threat of mass extinction. Hunter went on to shoot key sequences across the film, including the large-scale projection events at the Vatican, the United Nations, and the Empire State Building. Racing Extinction premiered at Sundance, received an Oscar nomination, was nominated for a Primetime Emmy, and was broadcast in 220 countries within twenty-four hours on Discovery Channel. That collaboration with Psihoyos has continued across five additional projects over the following decade, including The Game Changers, You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment, and the recently released Netflix Original The Plastic Detox.

On The Game Changers, Psihoyos asked Hunter to follow ultramarathon legend Scott Jurek's record attempt on the Appalachian Trail. Hunter built a small crew and disappeared into the wilderness for forty days. When he returned with the hard drives, Psihoyos named him lead director of photography for the entire film. The Game Changers went on to become the best-selling documentary in iTunes history in less than one week, sold out over a thousand theaters worldwide through Fathom Events, and is reportedly among the most-watched documentaries in Netflix history. It was executive produced by James Cameron, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jackie Chan, Lewis Hamilton, Novak Djokovic, and Chris Paul.

Through Fisher Stevens, who had taken note of Hunter's cinematography on Racing Extinction and brought him into the fold for his next production, Hunter spent two years filming Before the Flood alongside Leonardo DiCaprio across eleven countries. The production moved from the coral reefs of French Polynesia to the Vatican, the White House, Elon Musk's Gigafactory, the depths of the Ecuadorian Amazon, and the signing of the Paris Climate Accord. Hunter served as a versatile and integral part of the camera department, contributing across MōVi operation, additional cinematography, and solo shoots throughout the production. Before the Flood became the most-watched film in National Geographic history, with over sixty million viewers, a simultaneous broadcast in 171 countries, and a strategic free release across every major platform in the ten days before the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Hunter went on to collaborate with Stevens and Malcolm Venville on the Formula E documentary And We Go Green, which premiered at Cannes and was produced by DiCaprio's Appian Way alongside RadicalMedia.

Hunter's five-year collaboration with the artist JR began in the back of a Land Cruiser in Somaliland, where both were working on separate projects for the first time in the same region. Over the course of a week, JR noticed Hunter's ability to be entirely self-sufficient in an extremely demanding environment, and by the end of it, they exchanged contacts. Weeks later, JR's producer Marc Azoulay called to book Hunter for a project on the U.S.–Mexico border that became Tecate, a short film featured in JR's Paper & Glue. From there, Hunter and JR worked together to create the Chronicles of San Francisco and Chronicles of New York, large-scale participatory art projects that cast strangers off the street and turned their stories into larger than life murals and video installations, one of which now hangs at the entry of the SF MoMA. Hunter also shot the Guns in America project for TIME Magazine, which earned a 2019 News and Documentary Emmy nomination. Paper & Glue, the first feature Hunter and JR made together, premiered at Tribeca, received two Emmy nominations, qualified for Academy Award consideration, and was produced by Imagine Documentaries alongside Brian Grazer and Ron Howard. He also shot and produced Tehachapi, a continuation of JR's work inside a California supermax prison, which was recently acquired by Masterclass.

Outside of his feature work, Hunter has operated extensively in the field in some of the most challenging environments in documentary. He made four trips to Standing Rock between 2016 and 2017, where he pivoted from traditional filmmaking to real-time livestreaming, rigging a RED camera with a 1200mm lens and broadcasting the resistance to over 100,000 concurrent viewers on eviction day. He served as Jerome Jarre's sole cinematographer across five trips to Somaliland for the Love Army relief campaign, which raised over $2.2 million and distributed $1 million directly to families in need. He continued with Jarre into Bangladesh, making multiple trips to the Rohingya refugee camps over eighteen months and forming a years-long relationship with a young translator named Mohib, whom Hunter later helped resettle in the United States. He has embedded with anti-poaching units in Zimbabwe and South Africa, screened conservation films village by village across Raja Ampat in Indonesia, and was part of the team alongside Louie Psihoyos and Kyle Vogt that set the record for the fastest expedition to touch all seven continents, covering the globe in eighty-two hours. He has also dived with tiger sharks in the Bahamas, gone undercover inside Indonesian wet markets, and shot a surf film on the coast of Lebanon during a window between Formula E productions on opposite sides of the world.

After a decade behind the camera for some of the most decorated directors in documentary, Hunter stepped into the director's chair with UNEARTH, a feature about Bristol Bay's Indigenous leaders and commercial fishermen confronting the largest proposed copper mine in the world's largest salmon ecosystem. The film began in a New York coffee shop after two Alaskan fishermen reached out to him about the Pebble Mine threat, and grew over five years into a production that spanned Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Washington DC, British Columbia, and Brazil. Hunter directed, produced, and served as the lead director of photography, raising the money independently before later securing grants from the Rogovy Foundation and the Together Films Climate Action Fund. UNEARTH premiered at DOC NYC in November 2024 and has since screened at twenty-three festivals, earning seven wins, including Jackson Wild Best Film (Planet in Crisis), Woods Hole Best Documentary Feature, and Oakland International Best Feature Documentary, along with three nominations including DOXA Best Documentary Feature. Erin Brockovich watched the film and came aboard as executive producer, leading to a Variety exclusive and significant press traction. Hunter was named to DOC NYC's 40 Under 40 class of 2024 and has since joined the advisory council for the Environmental Film Festival in Washington, DC. The film's impact campaign partners include the NRDC, SeaLegacy, Earthworks, and WaterBear, with an advisory board that includes Psihoyos, WaterBear founder Ellen Windemuth, and former Discovery Studios president Carole Tomko.

He is based in New York and Maine, where he is in development on his next feature while continuing to collaborate with many of the same filmmakers that he built his career with.