Jon directed, co-wrote, and produced Urbania, which was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. The Lionsgate release won nine other film festivals; was named Best Film of the Year by Movieline, BoxOffice Magazine, and Baltimore City Paper; and was listed as One of the Year's Ten Best in every major LA paper, Time Out NY, the SF Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, & many others. Urbania made history as the first film to use a digital intermediate; Shear conceived the part of the process that conforms a film's negative.

Jon entered the business as an actor and was featured in such films as Independence Day and Heathers; starred in the original Pulitzer Prize winning production of Angels in America; and appeared on Broadway in Six Degrees of Separation, Shimada, and Runaways. He won three LA Dramalogue Awards and the San Diego Drama Critics Circle Award. His most recent theater work includes directing Jeremy Sisto in Sanguine and producing Val Kilmer's one-man play Citizen Twain.

Shear's a script consultant for projects from two hundred million dollar tent-poles to two hundred thousand dollar indies. He was a creative consultant on Nickelodeon's Secret World of Alex Mack and The Journey of Alan Strange; runs The Script Stage, which performs screenplays in development with such actors as Michael Sheen, Damian Lewis, and Kristen Bell; and leads private group classes and individual coaching sessions on acting and directing the actor worldwide.

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Jon teaches directing, screenwriting, and acting in the MFA film programs at NYU and Columbia University. Starting this fall, he'll also be helping to shape the Directing Actors part of Brooklyn College's new MFA film program, the only one in America affiliated with a working film studio.

Shear's latest film projects as writer-director, Pursuit of Pleasure and Red Light Green Light, are currently under option and he's preparing his first documentary, Yours Anne: a diary of The Diary of Anne Frank. Jon's a Brooklyn native and a graduate of Harvard University, where he won the Harvard Prize for writing and the McDonnell Award for his contribution to the arts.