Three decades on the cutting edge of American storytelling.

David Tarleton is an Emmy-nominated producer, director and editor, and Chair and Professor of the Department of Film and Media Arts at Syracuse University. Across more than three decades, he has made narrative features, documentary, television, theatre and social-impact films — and trained the filmmakers, animators and image-makers coming up behind him.

He came to filmmaking by way of the stage. A child actor who worked at Colonial Williamsburg in the fife and drum corps and later as an actor/historian, he was an Echols Scholar at the University of Virginia, where he directed plays. Discovering filmmaking as an undergraduate led him to New York University to study film, and from there to the University of Southern California, where he earned an MFA in Cinema-Television. His thesis film, the gothic fairy tale Dinner, premiered at Slamdance, aired on SyFy, and launched a career that has moved freely between major-network commissions and independent authorship — between narrative and documentary, and between film, television and theatre.

He has produced, directed or edited programs for Sony Pictures, Apple TV+, Walt Disney Pictures, Syfy, Comedy Central, Fox, Showtime, Universal and Warner Brothers. As editor of Disney's Statler and Waldorf From The Balcony, he helped shape a Muppets series that won a Webby and a Telly and landed on Time Magazine's list of "25 Websites We Can't Live Without." He produced and directed Hunter, a supernatural thriller distributed by Random Media, and the 3D science-fiction series Dark Secrets, which played domestically, internationally and on Netflix. Earlier credits include VFX supervisor on Steve James's documentary feature Head Games, senior editor on The Pat Kilbane Show for Comedy Central, and senior editor at the pioneering internet television studio Wirebreak.

The longest collaboration of his career is with his wife, the actor and filmmaker Adria Dawn. They co-founded Tarleton/Dawn Productions in 2004, and the company has produced more than forty films, several plays, a streaming series and a body of short work. Their sensibility began in extreme comedy and the improv series Dorkumentary, and has since opened into social-impact and dramatic work without losing its edge. Recent Tarleton/Dawn films include the Telly Award-winning Karen, Gray Area and Spiral, and their newest film Mantra, all of which he produced and co-directed. He and Dawn have frequently co-taught and made films together with students.

Through Revealing Media Group, where he is a partner, he produces, co-directs, shoots and edits the Kids Matter series of socially activist short films — on subjects such as identity, bullying, exclusion and gun violence — including the Emmy-nominated Identity. He is also producer of the long-form documentary Little Dreamers, on Syrian refugee children in Lebanon, which spun off the award-winning SafeZone shorts, and produced and edited the feature documentary What Babies Want, narrated by Noah Wyle. He is in postproduction on the all-greenscreen feature The Photographist, adapted from Hans Christian Andersen.

As Chair of Film and Media Arts at Syracuse, Tarleton leads a large department spanning film, animation, computer art, art photography and art video. He came to the role after serving as Director of Graduate Programs in Cinema and Television Arts at Columbia College Chicago. He teaches primarily in directing and editing, and has led courses in filmmaking for social change.

He has served as a juror for numerous festivals and awards, was a programmer at Slamdance for five years, and organized the CILECT Global Postproduction Symposium. He serves on the advisory boards of the Syracuse International Film Festival and the WCNY Entertainment Academy. His writing has appeared in CineMontage and Screen Magazine. He is a member of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and the Motion Picture Editors Guild, and serves as Co-Chair of the Entertainment Industry Caucus of the University Film and Video Association.