Joe Fortunato

A native of Akron, Ohio, Joe Fortunato began his entertainment career as a research assistant on NBC's TODAY show in the summer of 1988. After graduating from Yale University the following year, he came to Los Angeles and worked at ABC in Children's & Family Programs where he oversaw the highly rated Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show. Fortunato then spent the next five years developing movies for television, starting at NBC and then as head of development at Steve Krantz Productions. From there, he joined the Creative Affairs team at Shukovsky English Entertainment (SEE) to help develop prime-time series for the company. At SEE, he was involved with such comedies as The Louie Show, Ink, Murphy Brown and the CBS pilot Lawyers. While working closely with seasoned comedy writers, Fortunato became interested in pursuing a writing career of his own. He partnered with writer James Koonce, and together they worked as staff writers for the FOX comedy Living in Captivity under the tutelage of Murphy Brown creator Diane English. From there, the pair wrote several TV pilots and a feature film, Nowhere Man, which was being developed at Disney. As both a writer and executive, Fortunato has served as a panelist on several comedy and writing seminars and has been a judge for the Scriptwriter's Network annual writing competition as well as the WGA awards. He also spent three years on the Board of Directors for Future of Hollywood, a philanthropic organization comprised of young professionals in the entertainment industry, where he wrote a popular column for the organization's quarterly newsletter. Aside from his full-time duties as a Sr. Lecturer at ASU, Fortunato also serves on the executive board for the Independent Feature Project (IFP), Phoenix Chapter and is a member of the Writer's Guild of America.