Christopher Cassel
Christopher Cassel is a Primetime Emmy Award-winning director, writer and show runner whose credits have ranged from feature vérité docs to character-driven TV series to historical docudramas and biographical profiles of well-known public figures. He has created programming for National Geographic, Discovery, History, Science, Animal Planet, Bravo, A&E, Weather Channel, American Heroes Channel, Investigation Discovery, HLN, INSP and The Travel Channel, as well as independent projects for festival and retail distribution.
Chris earned his first directing credit for Rome: Engineering an Empire, produced for History. When it premiered in September 2005, it drew one of the network's highest ratings ever, winning two Primetime Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Nonfiction Special. His follow-up, Egypt: Engineering an Empire, premiered on The History Channel in 2006, and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Art Direction. Those specials spawned a thirteen-episode series celebrating the engineering genius of other great historical cultures.
Since then, Chris has directed, written and produced four more specials for History, including The White House: Behind Closed Doors (2008), featuring an exclusive all-access tour of the White House with Laura Bush, and Chris' interviews with the President and First Lady, and Rise of the Superbombs (2018), which reveals the most fearsome future weapons in the world's major military arsenals, and features the inside perspectives of senior officers in the Army, Air Force and Navy.
In 2010-2011, Chris supervised, directed and wrote Rising: Rebuilding Ground Zero (2011), a six-part series for Discovery Channel that followed the rebirth of the World Trade Center through the eyes of the builders, architects, politicians and 9/11 family members. Steven Spielberg presided as the Executive Producer.
In 2012, Chris started his own shingle, Castle Pictures, which quickly gained traction as a full-service production company. As President and Creative Director of the company, Chris developed and produced original semi-scripted and unscripted projects for a range of broadcast and digital clients. From 2012-2018, Castle Pictures delivered three series and six specials - 23 episodes of programming, with gross sales of $8.2 million. The company's Wild West docudrama series Gunslingers set ratings records that still stand for Discovery's American Heroes Channel and garnered two Emmy nominations.
Next, Castle Pictures delivered a series of high profile specials for National Geographic Channel, including the Explorer special Bill Nye's Global Meltdown (2015), which follows Bill Nye the Science Guy as he explorers the "five stages of climate change grief," from Denial to Acceptance, with some help from his "therapist," Dr. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The documentary won the prestigious Sentinel Award in the Climate Change Category.
More recently, Chris has served as show runner on two seasons of Science Channel's Secrets of the Underground (2017-2018) and director of the true crime series Primal Instinct for Investigation Discovery. In 2020 he directed his first full-length feature documentary, Into the Lost Desert, which follows Italian explorer Max Calderan as he becomes the first person to cross the world's last unexplored desert, Saudi Arabia's Rub' al Khali.
Prior to beginning his long form television career, Chris worked as a production assistant at CBS News Productions, and as a print journalist for The York Dispatch. He holds a B.A. in Communication from York College of Pennsylvania.