U.S. Writer, Director, Producer, Poet, and Activist

Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia University School of the Arts in the Film Department

One of the Panther 21 while incarcerated for his active participation in the Black Panther Party Joseph earned two college degrees and wrote five plays and two volumes of poetry. He is a full professor and former chair of Columbia University’s Graduate Film Division and the artistic director of the New Heritage Theatre Group in Harlem. He has been featured on HBO's Def Poetry Jam, BET's American Gangster and on Tupac Shakur's "The Rose That Grew From Concrete" Volumes 1 & 2. He is the author of the interactive biography on Tupac Shakur,Tupac Shakur Legacy.

Joseph was nominated for a 2008 Academy Award in the Best Song category for his contributions to the song "Raise It Up", performed by IMPACT Repertory Theatre and Jamia Nash in the 2007 film August Rush

His memoir Panther Baby was published in February 2012 by Algonquin Books.

He is the co- founder and artistic director of IMPACT, a Harlem-based youth theatre company, and executive director of New Heritage Films, a not-for-profit organization that provides training and opportunities for minority filmmakers.

Joseph’s is a three-time winner of the National Black Programming Consortium’s Prize Pieces Award, a two-time winner of the Black Filmmaker Hall of Fame Award, a winner of the International Film and Video Association Award, and a recipient of the New York Fine Arts Fellowship.

He wrote and directed Drive By: A Love Story, Da Zone, and the docudrama Hughes Dreams Harlem for Black Starz. Joseph is the author of Tupac, Legacy (Simon & Schuster). He has also written the script for a Broadway musical based on the life of Tupac Shakur. In 2015 Jamal Joseph produced the film Chapter & Verse starring New Heritage Theatre Group’s Artist in Residence Daniel Beaty.