ZACH VERDIN is an American artist and a fourth-generation Los Angeles Jew born on Texas soil who now lives in Tennessee. He’s currently in pre-production on the film American Trip, which he’ll direct in the fall of 2026. Shot on location across the Southwest, the movie is based on a screenplay he co-wrote. It will be Verdin’s first feature film.
Across his practice, Verdin nurtures diverse constellations of collaborators to produce artifacts, brands, and spaces. Motivating this work is a theory of power that’s centered on vital culture and its role in transforming American society. This is the vision that guides Parable, an entertainment brand Verdin created in 2024 to produce sacred American stories and invest in artist-owned businesses. Many of Parable’s initiatives bridge new media and entertainment, like Doomscroll, a political talk show created and hosted by the online-culture critic and artist Joshua Citarella. Parable also invests in narrative films and documentaries about the multifarious experience of life in the United States, including Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (2024), winner of three Academy Awards, four BAFTAs, and three Golden Globes.
An important precursor to Parable was NewHive, a multimedia publishing platform and community for internet art that Verdin founded in 2009 and helped grow to millions of users over its eight-year lifespan. Today he works to activate existing communities across America and to cultivate new ones, developing physical and online spaces while elevating individuals whose visionary work is rooted in their unique geography. In Glass Farms, TN, he’s collaborating with architect Matt Moffitt on American Sanctuary, the first in a series of structures that employ the language of architecture to literalize the human need for refuge, reflection, and communion.
Verdin sits on the Board of Directors at Institute 193, founded in 2009 and based in Lexington, KY, which collaborates with artists, musicians, and writers to document the cultural landscape of the modern South. He formerly served as the executive director of Knowledge Futures, founded at MIT in 2019 to make information useful. His work has been covered in a range of media outlets, including The New York Times, Bloomberg, Buzzfeed, Fast Company, The Verge, and Rolling Stone. He was also the subject of a 2018 QAnon drop accusing him of being part of the Silicon Valley Illuminati.