Christian Ortega

Christian Ortega was born in Secaucus, New Jersey. As a child, he enjoyed playing soccer and shooting matchbox car races with spectacular slow-motion crashes on his family's Mini-DV camcorder. He took that love of filmmaking into high school, where he produced, directed, and starred in 'Christian and Ryan's Bucket of Fun,' a highly anticipated weekly slapstick comedy that was screened in each classroom in the school. Christian went on to graduate from Emerson College with a B.A. in New Media and an invigorated passion for television and movie making. In the past decade, Christian has had a broad career working as a Field Director, Director of Photography, and Actor. He has field directed numerous loosely-scripted reality documentary investigation series such as 'Contact' for Discovery Plus, 'Infamy' for VH1, 'Cry Wolf' for Discovery Investigations, 'Booze Traveler' for Travel, and countless others. In addition to field directing in the reality documentary re-creation world, within the past two years Christian has also served alongside producer Ken Sanders as Second-Unit Director for three feature-length thrillers for Lifetime. When he is not directing, Christian works as a Director of Photography. In the past three years, he has shot seven feature-length films for Lifetime and Tubi, among other streaming services. On the reality-documentary side of production, he has had a lengthy, successful career as a Director of Photography on everything from run and gun documentaries for Nat Geo, History, and Discovery, to fourteen-camera live style programming for GSN. In addition to his behind-the-scenes experience, Christian is an actor with more than 6,000 hours of training in the Meisner technique under Master Acting Teacher Robert X. Modica. He has also studied the Lee-Strasberg Method acting technique during his time in Los Angeles. He currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia with his lovely wife Roberta and his baby boy, River.