Jon Steele

Jon Steele was born in the American Northwest in 1950 and had already lived in six states by the time he was ten years old. He considers Great Falls, Montana to be the closest thing there is to hometown. He survived twelve years of Catholic education and went on to work an assortment of legal and illegal jobs all across America before joining Independent Television News of London. He worked and traveled through more than seventy countries across six continents. Along the way, he earned a reputation as one of the world's top cameramen/editors in dangerous environments. His autobiography, War Junkie was published in 2002 by Transworld and is today recognized as a cult classic of war reportage. In Baghdad on the day before the Iraq War began, he put his camera on the ground and quit. He moved to the south of France and lived without a television, radio or newspapers for a year. He spent his days writing and taking long walks in quiet places. In 2007, shocked by the numbers of suicides among American soldiers returning from war, Jon traveled to Iraq, alone and without support of any news organization. He lived for three months with a forward combat unit in a remote part of Iraq, filming their lives and recording their emotions in confessional style interviews for the award winning documentary, Baker Boys: Inside The Surge. Currently Jon lives in a small Swiss village set in the vineyards above Lake Geneva...with his Jordanian-born wife and the two abandoned cats they found in a road.