Backgrounder: Josh Aronson

By Kristen O'Gorman

A director and producer for more than 20 years, Josh Aronson has documented sex-change operations, Deaf Culture, the cut-throat world of classical music, and bullriding on film.

After graduating from New York University's film school, Aronson embarked on a career as a director and producer, creating hundreds of commercials, MTV music videos, and television shows and cable specials, including a half-hour dramatic pilot for Nickelodeon, a half-hour special on family values that aired on 48 cable networks, and 15 episodes of a Discovery Kids program, Outward Bound. But Aronson is perhaps best known for his documentary films, which have covered a wide range of provocative topics, from sex-change operations to the debate surrounding cochlear-implants, electronic devices that restore partial hearing to the deaf.

Aronson's most notable documentary, Sound and Fury, received an Academy Award nomination for Best Feature Documentary in 2001. The film followed a family as the parents struggled to decide whether their two deaf children should undergo cochlear-implant surgery, a controversial operation that has come under criticism from some in the deaf community, who contend that the implants will lead to the demise of sign language. (Ultimately, the parents decided in favor of the operation.)

Aronson recently completed a sequel, Sound and Fury: Six Years Later, which chronicles the family's post-surgery experiences with cochlear implants.

"What I always wanted in Sound and Fury was to make a plea for acceptance of choice," said Aronson, in an interview with Docurama, the documentary film label. "It is the right and the obligation of all parents to make these choices for their children. I pray that the film will also encourage parents to educate themselves about the possibilities before making the decision to, or not to, implant their child."

Aronson's recent documentaries include Feelin' No Pain (2000), a valentine to the doo-wop music of '50s Brooklyn; Playing For Real (2000), which examined the difficulties of building a career in today's classical music world; Beautiful Daughters (2006), about the first-ever production of "The Vagina Monologues" by a transsexual cast; and the feature-length Bullrider (2006), an intimate look at the world of rodeos and professional bullriding. In 2005, The Opposite Sex, in which the filmmaker followed two transgendered people on their profound, sometimes painful journey from one gender to another (each underwent sex-change surgery), premiered on Showtime.

Kristen O’Gorman is a junior at NYU, where she is studying journalism and history.

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