Steve Cohen (USA)
Co-Founder and Board Chair
Chicago Media Project

Steve has many eclectic interests and diverse passions—some say too many! These range from politics to law to philanthropy to media, and he’s thrown himself into each of them at one time or another.

While representing whistleblowers in his law practice, Steve became acutely aware of how effective media can be in speaking truth to power, and his first trip to Sundance in 2010 triggered his journey from lawyer to doc film investor to co-founder of Chicago Media Project with Paula in 2014.

Steve’s idea of a good time is interacting with like-minded people who also love to engage, create, experiment, brainstorm, disrupt and innovate. In other words, he has realized himself fully within the CMP community.

Personally and through CMP, Steve has been involved in more than 60 documentary films projects and the impact campaigns they have spawned. He has helped raise over $5M dollars for them. His screen credits include Oscar- and Emmy award-winners, and he has no intention of stopping anytime soon. He has overseen more than $4.5 million dollars of grant and equity funding for numerous documentaries including the Sundance 2019 hits Knock Down the House (Netflix) and One Child Nation (amazon) as Well as The Top-Grossing Biopic of All Time Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (Focus Features), The Feeling of Being Watched (Tribeca 2018), the Fourth Estate (Showtime) And Step (Fox Searchlight), to name a few. He served as an executive producer on The Infiltrators (Sundance 2019) and 306 Hollywood (Sundance 2018). Steve Co-Produced Blue Wall, Trophy (CNN Films), Voyeur (Netflix) and The 2017 Academy Award-Winning Documentary Icarus.