Justin Meckes is a writer and award-winning filmmaker living in Durham, NC. His writing career began with a journal inspired by Benjamin Franklin's daily record of virtue and self-improvement. These personal reflections soon progressed into a news article concerning a week-long expedition to the Amazon rainforest and a long-form piece about a cross-country drive.

After these wanderings, Justin’s attention turned to filmmaking. It took ten years of heightened interest in directing and screenwriting—in which IFC’s Media Lab Shorts Uploaded featured one of his shorts—for Justin to return to novel writing.

Justin’s short stories have been published in online journals and magazines such as The Broadkill Review, Bewildering Stories, Idle Ink, Quail Bell Magazine, and Map Literary. He has also produced several works of fiction and is currently working on projects ranging from a series of middle-grade books to a historical novel.

MNML Films, or Minimal Films, is the umbrella under which Justin has created numerous and varied works. The short film “9 Brief Films from Suburban Zen” was a humorous spoken word short that appeared in festivals across the country and won Best Overall Spoken Word Production at Longleaf Film Festival in his hometown, Raleigh, NC. His animated film, “The Hot Air Balloon,” was screened at the 23rd RiverRun International Film Festival, which touts itself as “one of the premier film festivals in the southeastern United States.“ That same animated piece made its international premiere in Melbourne, Australia, in late 2022.

More recently, three short films inspired by his memoir have screened at festivals across the United States, including cities in New York, New Jersey, Florida, and California, while one, "Paranoid," was a semi-finalist in the FilmHaus Film Festival in Berlin, Germany. At the same time, his new children's film, "Triangle, Rectangle," was an official selection of the Los Angeles International Children's Film Festival and was subsequently invited to screen at the Re-Generation International Youth Film Festival in Melbourne, just like “The Hot Air Balloon.”

You can learn more in his CV and follow him on Instagram or Threads. You can also watch his children’s films on this website. Please use the contact form for additional inquiries.