Joe Pirro
Assistant Professor
SOC | FMA | Film and Media Arts
Degrees
BA The College of William & Mary ; MEd CUNY Hunter College
Bio
Joe Pirro is a producer whose work focuses on championing diverse, emerging voices both domestically and abroad. Joe produced Andrew Ahn’s The Wedding Banquet starring Bowen Yang and Lily Gladstone which premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival where Joe won the Sundance Institute - Amazon MGM Studios Producers Award for Fiction. The film was released theatrically in the U.S. by Bleecker Street and internationally by Universal. His other recent credits include Ahn’s Driveways (Berlin ’19), Gerardo Naranjo's El Yerno (released by Netflix May '26), Mike Ott’s McVeigh (Tribeca ’24), and Minhal Baig’s We Grown Now (Toronto, ’23) which was released in 2024 by Sony Pictures Classics and was nominated for three Film Independent Spirit Awards including Best Feature. Other credits include Kitty Green’s Casting JonBenet and The Assistant, Amman Abbasi’s Dayveon, Rhys Ernst’s Adam, and Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s A Prayer Before Dawn which premiered at Cannes in 2017 before being released theatrically by A24. Prior to producing, he worked at United Talent Agency, Red Hour Films, The Weinstein Co., and Focus Features. He is a Producer-in-Residence at Film Independent, a Producers Guild of America mentor for early career producers, and a Creative Advisor for SFFilm's Artist Development Programs. Originally from Roanoke, VA, Joe received his BA from The College of William & Mary and his M.S.Ed from Hunter College during which time he taught elementary school in Brooklyn.
