Donald Matos got his start as a film producer at Columbia Pictures, where he developed motion picture projects under the auspices of David Puttnam, Academy Award-winning producer of Chariots of Fire and The Killing Fields. Donald Matos pitched MacArthur genius grant recipient Charles Burnett’s feature project To Sleep with Anger, which eventually starred Danny Glover.

There is great interest in Donald Matos’ feature project Angels of Gold, which is a comedy-of-errors heist caper based on true events in his life. The story is about an incorrigible schemer and his ex-flame who instigate a gold heist involving very dangerous professionals that unravels into an outrageous quest for love, wealth, and redemption.

The Sundance Institute selected another of Donald Matos’ feature projects, No Father, Son, or Holy Ghost, for the final round of its 2008 January Screenwriters Lab. The story is an urban drama about a father who overcomes his sense of failure as a man when he tries to save his runaway sons from a life on the streets. This is a personal story drawn from Donald Matos’ life experience as a Puerto Rican-Italian growing up in a turbulent family on the East Coast.

Donald Matos is writing a new comedy, Confessions of a Fast Food Educator, which is about his outrageous experience as a school director fighting for his students and the spirit of education against a morally and scholastically bankrupt private postsecondary institution.

Donald Matos was the creator and director of The Lee Strasberg Digital Film School, which is part of the world-renowned Lee Strasberg Institute. Donald Matos also created the first bachelor’s degree program in digital film in the country. Incidentally, Donald Matos was trained first and foremost as a director by Delia Salvi, one of Lee Strasberg’s most respected disciples and an active member of the famed Actors Studio.

Donald Matos is Founder and CEO of his own film, television, and Internet production company, One-Cinema, Inc. Donald Matos is also Founder and CEO of The Institute for New Cinema, a digital film school, and its non-profit Cultural Center, both of which he is working on the financing to officially launch.

Donald Matos has won awards in screenwriting and filmmaking, including the prestigious Focus Film Award for his film The Other Side. Donald Matos’ work has been recognized by such notable organizations as the Academy for Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Sundance Institute, the American Film Institute, the National Playwrights Conference, and the Nissan Focus Film Awards. Donald Matos has a B.A. from Yale University and an M.F.A. in Film Production from UCLA.

Donald Matos’ cinematic influences are: Charlie Chaplin, John Ford, Jean Renoir, Francois Truffaut, Vittorio De Sica, Akira Kurosawa, Luis Bunuel, Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Andrzej Wajda, Bernardo Bertolucci, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Zhang Yimou, and Chen Kaige.

Donald Matos admires the lives of: Lao Tzu, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus Christ, Muhammad, Henry David Thoreau, Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, Muhammad Ali, Nelson Mandela, Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, Lord David Puttnam, and his mother, Lucille Matos.