His work has been seen worldwide on HBO, Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV+, Showtime, the BBC, and beyond.
In 2023, Lough co-directed and executive produced the HBO Original doc-series Telemarketers alongside Josh and Benny Safdie. The series became HBO Max’s most-watched documentary series upon release, earning a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series and winning both the Critics Choice Documentary Award and Cinema Eye Honors Award.
His most recent feature, Deepfaking Sam Altman (2025), marks a bold tonal shift—a darkly comic, self-reflexive exploration of AI, authorship, and obsession. Executive-produced by Kevin Hart and Vox Studios, the film premiered at SXSW and features Lough himself on-screen, co-directing alongside an AI chatbot modeled after Sam Altman. Blurring documentary, satire, and performance, the film interrogates the ethics of synthetic identity in an age racing faster than its conscience.
Lough emerged at just 19, directing three music videos for MF DOOM, and quickly transitioned to features with his narrative debut Bomb the System (2002), a graffiti-culture drama that earned an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best First Feature and landed him on Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film.” His follow-up, Weapons (2007), starring a then-emerging Nick Cannon and Paul Dano, premiered at Sundance, received a Grand Jury Prize nomination, and was released by Lionsgate.
He soon pivoted to documentary filmmaking, co-directing The Upsetter: The Life and Music of Lee “Scratch” Perry (2008), narrated by Benicio del Toro, and the explosive Lil Wayne portrait The Carter (2009). Despite legal efforts to suppress it, The Carter became one of the most influential music documentaries ever made, routinely cited by Rolling Stone, Billboard, NME, and Complex. The Upsetter was later inducted into the Criterion Collection.
Lough’s later work interrogated power, ideology, and extremism. The New Radical (2017), which premiered at Sundance, featured a rare interview with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian Embassy and examined Bitcoin, hacktivism, and 3D-printed weapons. Alt-Right: Age of Rage (2018) followed, airing on Netflix in the U.S. and the BBC in the U.K. after a year embedded with both neo-Nazi groups and ANTIFA.
A graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Lough is a longtime mentor at the Sundance Native and Latino Screenwriters Labs and a former member of Sundance’s Diversity Outreach Committee. He runs the documentary production company ALL FACTS with film financier Greg Stewart. Equally comfortable filming violent extremists, underground artists, or global celebrities, Lough’s work is driven by an enduring fascination with subcultures, power structures, and the strange places where ambition and belief collide.