John Nordström

Filmmaker and director working full-time in AI-native production, with two 2026 festival Official Selections. NYFA-trained, with New York set experience in camera, editing, sound, and directing.

What sets me apart: three decades of enterprise systems engineering behind the director's chair — I design, build, and operate my own generation pipeline (image → upscale → video → voice → edit), then direct through it. The engineering serves the film. Because I can build, I don't wait for tools to exist.

Filmmaker & Director at johnnordstrom.studio (2025-06 – Present)

• Writer-director of AI-native films (working in the medium since 2024): Tristan and Isolde, The Outsider, Panda Tales, and the festival-selected After the Circus Curtain Goes Down.
• Currently in production on The Big House, a multi-part AI series adaptation of the 1930 MGM prison classic (public domain 2026) — full screenplay, locked 19-asset character/environment library, and an end-to-end Nano Banana → Topaz → Higgsfield/Seedance 2.0 generation pipeline.
• Ongoing AI content production across multiple YouTube channels, including comedy shorts localized into Spanish, Hindi, and Mandarin via AI dubbing and lip-sync workflows.

Founder & CEO at SynthDen AI (SYNTHDEN LLC) (2024-01 – Present)

• Designed and built, end to end and solo, an AI creator operating system for identity-consistent content at scale — faces and characters stay locked across hundreds of images and videos (LoRA identity builds, ArcFace QC, VEED Fabric lip sync).
• Full production loop in production: image generation, image-to-video, multilingual lip sync, batch campaign video, automated scheduling, and publishing to Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.
• Shipped GenSpend — a Chrome MV3 extension and SaaS dashboard that tracks real AI generation spend across 10+ vendors (Kling, Runway, ElevenLabs, Higgsfield, Veo, Magnific, Topaz, Suno) with a wallet-delta reconciliation engine; live on the Chrome Web Store with paying customers.
• Owned the entire stack: identity pipeline, generation orchestration, billing, content automation, and publishing infrastructure — Next.js, Express, PostgreSQL, Cloudflare R2, Vercel, PM2.

Founder at GenAI TV (2024-03 – 2024-08)

• Founded and operated an OTT streaming platform for AI-generated film, animation, and creative content — signed creators, live programming, and a licensing model; folded the platform engineering into SynthDen AI.

Freelance Film Production — Camera, Editing, Directing at Manhattan Skyline Films / 2-4 Etainment (2001 – 2005)

• Cinematographer, Tiger Beer commercial (2002); editor and sound recordist, Waiting for Eugene (2002); cinematographer and sound recordist, A Situation Wanted (2003).
• Director, Godfather E music video "Effed" and "The CD Bash" DVD compilation (2004); cinematographer/editor, Medtronic surgical training video (2003); live concert videography, Club RARE NYC (2005).

Enterprise Technology — Engineering & Production Systems Leadership at NJ Innovation Institute · RWJBarnabas Health · Newark Beth Israel / Children's Hospital of NJ · CHOC · Montefiore · St. Vincent's (1994 – 2024)

• Director, Integration Technology — NJ Innovation Institute (2022–2024): led statewide clinical data exchange and CMS validation serving 2.2M+ beneficiaries; architected AWS-based integration pipelines across Epic, Cerner, Allscripts, and PointClickCare; directed multidisciplinary engineering teams moving pilots into production at scale.
• IT Site Director & HIPAA Security Officer — Newark Beth Israel / Children's Hospital of NJ (2017–2022): directed infrastructure, application, and integration teams for a 665-bed quaternary hospital; maintained the specialized systems behind heart and lung transplant programs — environments where downtime was not an option.
• Systems Manager, Enterprise Imaging & Cardiovascular IT — RWJBarnabas Health (2013–2016): architected multi-facility imaging and data platforms across 13 hospitals; earlier clinical-systems leadership at CHOC, Montefiore, CarePoint, Mountainside, and St. Vincent's.
• Three decades of the discipline studios ask for: distinguishing real innovation from hype, leading technical teams, and shipping prototypes into reliable production.

BFA in Film/Video and Photographic Arts – New York Film Academy (1992 – 1994)

B.S. in Computer Science – Canterbury (1988 – 1992)