Emmy Award-winning executive producer, Vin Di Bona, captivated television audiences when he introduced America's Funniest Home Videos in 1989. America’s Funniest Home Videos is now in its 22nd season, the longest running entertainment program on the ABC schedule.
The following year, adding the element of performance to his concept of spontaneous "grass-roots" humor, Di Bona created America's Funniest People which ran for four years on ABC.
After achieving unprecedented success in the reality arena, Di Bona branched into other areas of programming. He has produced three highly acclaimed Movies-of-the Week, For the Love of Nancy and Touched By Evil for ABC and Voices From Within for NBC. He ventured into cable programming with Sherman Oaks, a situation comedy for Showtime and Maximum Drive, a children’s motorized vehicles competition show for Family Channel. Maximum Drive was nominated for a Cable ACE Award, the industry's top honor in the Children's Programming Series category.
Di Bona has also produced numerous reality-based specials for ABC, including the I Survived A Disaster series and a one-hour family game show entitled The Big Moment. Di Bona also executive produced the Disney Channel game show Off the Wall, as well as two series for the Fox Family Channel, Show Me The Funny and Extraordinary World of Animals. For the Fox Broadcasting Company, Di Bona Executive Produced a unique hidden camera show that appears to be a situation comedy entitled Meet the Marks. In addition, Di Bona has also executive produced Chicken Soup For The Soul, a series based on the best-selling book for PAX TV.
Di Bona has also lent his executive producing talents to DS Entertainment for an American version of a hit Japanese reality/soap/relationship show titled Future Diary. The ABC series, titled The Dating Experiment asks the question, “Can a series of orchestrated events create love between two strangers?”
In addition to his production activities, Vin Di Bona also serves as chair for The Caucus for Television Producers, Writers and Directors. In 2007, Di Bona was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2009, in a special ceremony, artifacts from America's Funniest Home Videos were added to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. The America's Funniest Home Videos donation joins the museum's permanent entertainment collections and represents one of the first reality-genre shows on television.
A pioneer in both reality TV and user-generated content, long before the advent of the Internet and the explosion of reality TV, Vin Di Bona recognized the power that media has in reflecting and shaping our lives. His acknowledgement that we all "live in a fishbowl" - that our lives are continuously documented by video - has only accelerated and been amplified in the digital age.
In 2010, Vin approached entertainment executive, Bruce Gersh to partner in building a creative company that delivers the next generation of entertainment and embraces the creative community as true partners. Today that company is Fishbowl Worldwide Media.
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