Joshua Seftel

Joshua Seftel is an Academy Award®-winning filmmaker and two-time Oscar® nominee whose latest documentary, All The Empty Rooms (Netflix), won a 2026 Oscar® and was executive produced by Adam McKay and NBA coach Steve Kerr. The film follows veteran CBS correspondent Steve Hartman on a secret project photographing the bedrooms left behind by children killed in school shootings. Seftel received an Academy Award®-nomination in 2023 for Stranger at the Gate (The New Yorker), executive produced by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Malala Yousafzai, which follows a US Marine who planned to blow up an Indiana mosque, and how the kindness of the Muslim worshipers transformed the direction of his life.

At age 22, Seftel made his first film, Lost and Found (PBS, 1990), which told the story of Romania's abandoned children. Other works range from the political (Taking on the Kennedys, POV), to the empowering (his Peabody Award-nominated series Secret Life of Muslims), to the joyful (his Emmy-winning original Queer Eye for the Straight Guy), to the satirical (War, Inc. starring John Cusack, Marisa Tomei and Ben Kingsley).

Seftel is also a contributor to the Peabody Award-winning podcast This American Life and to The New York Times. For the past decade, Seftel has also produced a series of segments for CBS Sunday Morning featuring his 88-year-old mother, Pat. The New York Times remarked, “the word ‘droll’ seems as if it were invented for these two.”

Seftel lives in Brooklyn with his wife, filmmaker Erika Frankel, and their two young daughters.