Storyteller. Filmmaker. Creative Director.
Two-Time Emmy® Award-Winning
Writer, Producer & Director
More than 20 years telling stories across entertainment, advertising, documentary, emerging media, and national defense.
Matt Van Hoesen is an Emmy® Award-winning writer, producer, director, cinematographer, editor, creative director, content creator, communications professional, and marketing specialist with more than two decades of professional experience.
Born and raised in Tucson, Arizona, Matt earned his BFA in Media Arts from the University of Arizona before beginning a career built around that single passion.
His work has ranged from award-winning television commercials and national entertainment content to documentaries, music video, elite higher-education campaigns, emerging media, and sophisticated communications for the national defense industry. Combining storytelling, visual design, technology, strategy, and audience psychology lets him approach a creative problem from many directions at once.
“Great creative work doesn’t just look good. It makes people feel something, understand something, or see something differently.”
Matt Van Hoesen
Over thirty career honors across broadcast, advertising, filmmaking, and branded content — including a prestigious ADDY® Best of Show.
*Including a prestigious ADDY® Best of Show
Feature Documentary
Matt served as Executive Producer, Editor, and Graphics Director on the paranormal documentary Shadows in the Desert, created alongside Monsters Among Us host Derek Hayes and Hysteria 51 podcast host David Flora.
Debuted at #1 on Amazon upon release.
Currently Streaming on Apple TV, Prime Video, Tubi, and more.
Digital Series
The Modern Geek Show
Created and produced two seasons of the original digital series The Modern Geek Show for Comedy Central/Viacom. Also wrote, edited, produced, and designed original content supporting national entertainment brands and programming.
Animation / Network Branding
Original Animated Interstitial
Produced an original animated network-branding interstitial for TBS. Matt has also created original animation and creative development work associated with major entertainment properties including Conan O'Brien and Lip Sync Battle, from creators including Stephen Merchant and John Krasinski.
Branded Content
Original Creative Content
Produced original creative content for Microsoft as part of a career that has included collaborations with internationally recognized brands, networks, organizations, and institutions.
Commercial Production
Broadcast & Integrated Marketing
Matt spent approximately 12 years in commercial production and creative direction — writing, directing, producing, editing, and developing hundreds of television commercials and integrated marketing campaigns, from traditional broadcast advertising to recruitment, education, brand storytelling, and integrated marketing.
Most recently, Matt has brought more than two decades of cinematic storytelling and marketing experience into the defense industry, helping transform highly complex technologies into compelling, understandable stories.
His work combines cinematic visuals, motion graphics, video production, marketing strategy, technical storytelling, and sophisticated design to help defense technology companies communicate some of the world’s most advanced capabilities — making extremely complicated systems clear, visually engaging, and memorable.
This creative work has been viewed and used throughout the U.S. Department of Defense, the Pentagon, NATO, and other government and national-security organizations.
Work performed for private-industry clients. No affiliation with, employment by, or endorsement from any government organization is implied.
Cinematic Visuals
Filmmaking craft applied to systems that rarely get to be seen.
Motion Graphics
Design that turns architecture diagrams into something people follow.
Technical Storytelling
Engineering detail translated without losing accuracy or nuance.
Marketing Strategy
Messaging built for briefings, trade floors, and decision-makers.
An accomplished shooter with a strong visual eye — composition, lensing, and light treated as story decisions rather than technical ones.
Expert-level editorial. Pacing, rhythm, structure, and sound working together until a cut feels inevitable.
Matt’s work is driven by curiosity. Whether the subject is comedy, paranormal phenomena, advertising, technology, defense, documentary filmmaking, or something entirely unfamiliar, he starts by understanding the story, the audience, and what makes the subject worth caring about.
A multidisciplinary background lets him move between strategy and creativity, logic and intuition, technical complexity and human emotion — and to connect easily with engineers, executives, comedians, and eyewitnesses alike.
He is unwilling to settle for mediocre creative work, equally at home serving his own vision or someone else’s, and convinced that the best ideas come from understanding a subject deeply enough to see it from every angle.
In the early days of the internet — years before YouTube launched in 2005 and long before “going viral” became part of the marketing vocabulary — Matt created an online video called The Littlest Ghost that spread widely across the early web.
A small haunting, distributed by hand. Proof that a fascination with storytelling, emerging media, and the unexplained has been running in the background the whole time.
Other Experience
Producer and host of The Modern Geek Show podcast for Wizard World Comic Cons (now FAN EXPO HQ).
Music, entertainment, higher education, advertising, documentary, photography, emerging media, marketing, and technology.
Have a film, campaign, brand, technology, story, or unusual idea that deserves a great creative treatment? Let’s talk.
Tucson, Arizona
Working with clients nationwide and on location.
Reply within days
Every inquiry is read personally, not by a team.
Strange ideas welcome
The unusual projects are often the best ones.
