Luke Matheny
Class of 1993
Writer-Director-Producer
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Luke Matheny is an Oscar and Emmy winning writer, director, and producer. After graduating from Concord in 1993, he studied journalism at Northwestern University, later working in Chicago as an undistinguished copy editor and editorial assistant at several trade magazines and web sites.
In 2001, he left his job and moved to Paris for four months to spend all his savings on a low-budget independent comedy, A Place in France. The film was rejected by every film festival except the Wilmington International Film Festival, where it screened at Theater N. It also became the sample that earned him admission to New York University’s Graduate Film Program.
At NYU, Matheny wrote, directed, and acted in his thesis film, God of Love, which won the Student Academy Award and the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film. During his acceptance speech, he thanked his mother for handling craft services on the film, a clip the Academy continues to reuse in its Mother’s Day social-media posts.
Matheny went on to work in television, beginning as the producing director of IFC’s Maron, starring Marc Maron. Luke directed episodes featuring Denis Leary, Judd Hirsch, Adam Scott, David Cross, Danny Trejo, Ed Asner and others. He co-wrote the feature A Birder’s Guide to Everything, which co-starred Sir Ben Kingsley.
He later became showrunner and producing director of Amazon’s Gortimer Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street, which received recognition from the Writers Guild of America, the Directors Guild of America, and the Humanitas Prize. He also directed episodes of Netflix’s The Baby-Sitters Club as well as the YouTube series Me and My Grandma, starring Rhea Perlman. He co-wrote the Emmy-winning animated special Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth, narrated by Meryl Streep. And as co-showrunner of the Apple TV+ series Ghostwriter, he won a Daytime Emmy Award for Best Children’s Program.
Most recently, Matheny wrote and executive produced Charlotte’s Web, an animated adaptation of the E.B. White novel. The cast includes Amy Adams, Cynthia Erivo, Jean Smart, Randall Park, Danny Trejo, Keith David, and Elijah Wood.
In its online article about the special, the Wilmington News-Journal went out of its way to stress that Luke was "crying" while he wrote the script. While true, Luke also believes this detail is not headline-worthy.
Luke lives in South Pasadena, California, with his wife, Maileen, a television production manager, and their two children, Frank and Annie.
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