ABOUT - Brendan Patrick Hughes

Brendan Patrick Hughes is a Peabody Award-winning creator of films, podcasts, television, theatre and quixotic alt-comedy performance art. Recent projects include creating, producing, writing and hosting the critically-acclaimed 10-episode, documentary podcast Divine Intervention, about renegade nuns and priests who became cat burglars to sabotage the Vietnam draft, the pilot of which premiered in the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival, and which was released in March of 2025 by iHeartPodcasts, produced by Wonder Media Network. In April of 2026, it won a Peabody Award for the highest standard of storytelling excellence. He also produced and directed the narrative feature film Dindin, which was released to critical acclaim in october 2024 by Good Deed Entertainment. Before that, he produced and directed The Metal Detector, a half-hour documentary special now airing on PBS and streaming on the PBS App, and He is a graduate of the directing program at the Yale School of Drama.

He began his career in the theater, where he served in leadership positions such as Producing Artistic Director and Founder of the Theatre Cooperative in Boston, Artistic Director of the legendary Yale Cabaret, and Impresario of the Harbor Stage at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater. As a freelance director, he has directed roughly one hundred plays across the country, from Off-Off Broadway to Los Angeles.

Brendan is Clinical Assistant Professor of Film and Media at Sands College of Performing Arts at Pace University in New York City. He previously taught at Santa Monica College and Occidental College. He has served as a guest director at Harvard, Yale, Occidental College, Pace University, and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He has also led Apple employees in several Authenticity on Camera trainings.

As a performance artist, Brendan occasionally does spoken word performances in the form of fake TED talks on giant themes like ‘irony’ and ‘mediocrity,’ and released an alt-comedy concert album entitled The Pizzicato Effect, recorded at Ars Nova in New York City. His follow-up, Mediocrity: A Sophomore Effort, also recorded in New York in 2018, will perpetually be released ‘next year.’

Brendan grew up on a commune outside Boston founded by the inventor of rubber gloves, and as a toddler would nap in the sun on the stomach of a lazy bull named Stanley. He moonlights as an editor and animator, and was a motion graphics producer for a major network, as well as a Creative Director for Hairpin, a branding agency for the public sector. He divides his time between Los Angeles and New York with his wife and collaborator Emily Topper, a documentary cinematographer, and their son Oscar, an Arsenal fan.