author bio : stephen marshall

OFFICIAL

Stephen Marshall is an author, feature film director, and system architect whose career has spanned underground media, political filmmaking, and experiential technology design. He first broke into the mainstream with Channel Zero, a boundary-pushing video magazine distributed globally in record stores and bookstores. Hailed by The Village Voice as a revolution in television, the project led to an invitation from CNN’s chairman to launch a global youth news network — only to be shelved ahead of the Time Warner merger.

In 2000, he co-founded the guerrilla news portal GNN, serving as creative director and pioneering the now-ubiquitous “NewsVideo” format. Marshall directed over 15 short documentaries including the Sundance Award-winning Crack the CIA, and music videos for the Beastie Boys, Eminem, and 50 Cent. His non-fiction books, True Lies (Penguin/Plume) and Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing (Disinformation), explored information warfare and American duopoly, respectively.

His feature documentaries include BattleGround: 21 Days on the Empire’s Edge (Silver Hugo, Chicago Int’l Film Festival) and Holy Wars (IDFA Top 3 International Docs, Moviefone Top Docs 2010), praised by Variety for its “cool, agnostic approach” to ideological conflict. His narrative debut, This Revolution (Sundance, 2005), starred Rosario Dawson and was released in 2006.

In 2012, Marshall co-founded ora.systems, where he transitioned into a new role as a system architect and data futurist. Raising millions from some of the sector’s leading venture firms, ORA’s patented HALO technology, a 3D dynamic data visualization tool, was licensed by blue chip corporates like Adobe (to monitor the health of global product systems). This marked the start of his shift from storytelling to the design of intelligent interfaces.

From 2017–2025, he served as co-founder and special advisor to dashboard.earth, a civic tech platform backed by the City of Los Angeles and built to align individual climate actions with citywide resilience goals.

Marshall’s newest work, Speedrunning The Spacetime Continuum, represents a radical inquiry into the nature of consciousness and reality itself. Developed through immersive fieldwork and neurological experimentation, the project proposes spacetime 2.0 — a narrative feedback system embedded in reality, designed to catalyze agency, recursion, and up-leveling of the self for [r]evolutionary agency. This body of work bridges quantum physics, mysticism, cognition, and code, marking a new chapter in experiential research and ontological design.

He has traveled, lived, and worked in over 60 countries.

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PDF of my full bio broken down by project, here.