Jon directed, co-wrote, and produced?Urbania, which was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. The Lionsgate release won nine other film festivals; was named Best Film of the Year by?Movieline,?BoxOffice Magazine, and?Baltimore City Paper; and was listed as One of the Year's Ten Best in every major LA paper,?Time Out NY, the?SF Chronicle,?Chicago Tribune, and 30 other publications.?Urbania?made history as the first film to use a digital intermediate; Shear conceived the part of the process that conforms a film's negative.
Shear runs the Take Action Workshop, in which working film directors and actors explore how best to collaborate to create indelible film performances and scenes. He also serves as a script consultant for projects from two hundred million dollar tent-poles to two hundred thousand dollar indies and was a creative consultant on several Nickelodeon shows. Jon entered the business as an actor, using the pseudonym Jon Matthews because his family was being considered for the Witness Protection Program (He's the grandson of a hitman and son of a bookie and FBI operative). He was featured in such films as?Independence Day?and?Heathers; starred in the original Pulitzer Prize winning production of?Angels in America; and appeared on Broadway in?Six Degrees of Separation,?Shimada, and?Runaways.
Jon's most recent theater work includes directing Jeremy Sisto in?Sanguine?and producing Val Kilmer's one-man play?Citizen Twain. Shear's latest film projects as writer-director,?Pursuit of Pleasure?and?Red Light Green Light, are currently under option and he's preparing his first documentary,?Yours Anne: a diary of The Diary of Anne Frank.
Jon is a graduate of Harvard University, where he won the Harvard Prize for writing and the McDonnell Award for his contribution to the arts. Jon has taught Directing the Actor in the MFA film programs at NYU, Columbia, and Brooklyn College’s Graduate School at Steiner Studios, where he also teaches various courses in its MFA Screenwriting program.






Adjunct Assistant Professor, Film