Cole Schwartz

I was born in Dallas, Texas, and started my creative career in music as a rock guitarist. Between 2010 and 2017, I was fortunate enough to share the stage with global rock bands like Chevelle, Flyleaf, and Stone Sour while also recording studio albums with Grammy-winning music producers. During that time, I started to visually document the intersection of human emotion and music. After playing at Austin's famous SXSW Music Festival, I made the decision to transition my music career into the expression of those emotions using film and photography as my main creative medium. Today, I live in Chicago, Illinois, and work professionally as a director, director of photography, photographer, and photojournalist. I've been blessed to have filmed music videos that have generated more than 650M views for Grammy-winning and multi-platinum-selling artists including Chance The Rapper, Mac Miller, Post Malone, Lil Skies, Juice WRLD, Kevin Gates, and Wiz Khalifa. I've also worked on commercial brand projects for Whataburger, Lids, Daisy Sour Cream, Nike, TGI Fridays, and The Gentleman's Cooperative, among others. With an education concentration in cinematography from Columbia College, I think I have a unique perspective of cinematic creativity and possess the ability to blend the technical art of filmmaking with my real-world expertise as a musician. As far as PR and such, my work has been featured in Billboard Magazine, Yahoo! Music, Complex Magazine, Chicago Reader, DMagazine, The Dallas Morning News, and more than 100 online publications.