Joe Sabia

During his childhood, Sabia competed in spelling bees and memorized the capitals of every country in the world. He also taught himself to read and write Russian and later learned Italian.[1][2] In 2005, as a member of the comedy group, Asinine, Sabia began teaching himself to film and edit from his father's camera, while attending Boston College. He switched between the Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences and the Carroll School of Management at the university, debating whether to attend law school to become a politician before graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 2006.[1]

In 2007, Sabia won the International Pun Championship in Austin, Texas off a rhyming monologue about the 43 presidents that he wrote in under an hour.[1][3] Sabia moved to New York City in 2011 and gave a TED Talk on “The Technology of Storytelling" that same year. Sabia played piano three hours a day through his high school years, and is an amateur classical pianist attempting such compositions as Sergei Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3.[1][4]

In 2005, Sabia screened a spoof of The OC known as The BC, which he had created with members of his comedy group on an independent website using QuickTime. The show was about college kids at Boston College and a Jesuit priest, who takes in a troubled student from Boston University. It later featured cameos from Tim Russert, Doug Flutie and Jared Dudley, among others.[5] Sabia spent more than six hours each day working on the show.[1]

HBOlab, an experimental incubator of HBO, offered him a job out of college, where he was known as "whippersnapper who speaks to the Web the way Dolittle does to animals."[6] During that time, Sabia edited footage from the first six seasons of The Sopranos into a seven-minute series recap before the seventh season premiere called "Seven Minute Sopranos", which was uploaded without permission from HBO's lawyers. Series creator, David Chase was shown the video on the set of the series finale. Sabia's role in the video's creation was not public until The New York Times revealed it in a follow-up story.[7][8]

Jon Batiste introduced Sabia to Michael Thurber and Matt McCorkle in 2011. The three artists founded the YouTube music collective CDZA for conservatory-trained musicians to create experimental music videos. Sabia directed the videos on the YouTube channel.[9]

The non-profit organization, Mama Hope partnered with Sabia to create the "Stop the Pity, Unlock the Potential" video campaign, which worked to change the perception of Africans and Africa. Sabia's videos included "Alex Teaches Commando", which featured an African boy recapping the 1985 Arnold Schwarzenegger film, Commando, and "African Men, Hollywood Stereotypes".[4][10][11]

In 2014, Sabia and Aaron Rasmussen released a 'Time Machine' of "every cultural real-life reference from every episode of The Office" which took over one and one half years to compile and create.[12] After directing Booms, a short film on musical interpretation of the 1950s for Vanity Fair's "The Decade Series",[13] Sabia received a call from Condé Nast Entertainment while heading to the Dominican Republic asking for a video pitch for Sarah Jessica Parker. He developed a concept during a whale-watching trip as a comedic, rapid-fire questionnaire, which became "73 Questions".[2][14][15] In 2018, he received the "Best Cinematography" and "Best Pop Culture Video Series" Streamy Awards for his work in "73 Questions".[16]

Sabia interviewed Billie Eilish, an unknown artist in October 2017, and held onto the footage for "73 Questions" intending to give the same interview one year later for a side-by-side time capsule video. Eilish ballooned in success by October 2018 and the video was viewed more than 11 million times within a few weeks of release and 131 million overall.[1] He has also developed "Celebrity ASMR" for W Magazine and "Virtually Dating" for Facebook Watch.[1][17]

During his tenure at CNE, accusations of a lack of content featuring people of color and topics about non-white communities were directed towards the corporation. CNE's PR department cited comments by Condé Nast Entertainment SVP of programming Reggie Williams, who defended the scale system process based on data analysis: “In order to have cultural impact, you have to reach people, no matter what the cause.”[18][19]