Adam Bhala Lough is a Punjabi‑American film director, producer, and writer known for crafting award‑winning, high‑profit, and widely viewed film and television projects for HBO, Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV+, Showtime, the BBC, and beyond. In February 2022, it was announced that one of his documentaries would enter the revered Criterion Collection, cementing his place among cinema’s most enduring storytellers.

Lough burst onto the scene at 19 when he directed three music videos for MF DOOM. At 23 he premiered his narrative feature debut Bomb the System (2002), a graffiti‑culture drama that earned an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best First Feature and landed him on Filmmaker Magazine’s “Top 25 Indie Filmmakers to Watch.” His follow‑up, Weapons (2007), starring a then‑emerging Nick Cannon and Paul Dano, was nominated for the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and distributed by Lionsgate.

Transitioning to documentary, Lough co‑directed The Upsetter: The Life and Music of Lee Scratch Perry (2008), narrated by Academy Award‑winner Benicio del Toro, and the incendiary Lil Wayne portrait The Carter (2009). Though legally challenged by its subject, The Carter is routinely ranked among the greatest music documentaries of all time by Rolling Stone, NME, Billboard, and Complex. The Upsetter has since been inducted into the Criterion Collection.

His Sundance‑premiering The New Radical (2017) featured a rare interview with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian Embassy and explored Bitcoin and 3‑D‑printed guns, earning a slot on No Film School’s “Top 10 Political Docs of the Year.” Alt‑Right: Age of Rage (2018) followed, airing on Netflix (U.S.) and BBC (U.K.) after a fearless year embedded with both neo‑Nazi and ANTIFA.

Lough’s HBO Original doc‑series Telemarketers (2023), which he co‑directed and executive‑produced with Josh and Benny Safdie, became the most‑watched doc‑series on HBO MAX upon release. It earned a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series and won both the Critics Choice Documentary Award and Cinema Eye Honors Award.

His latest feature, Deepfaking Sam Altman—a sharp comedy about AI executive‑produced by Kevin Hart and Vox Studios—premiered at SXSW 2025 and is slated for theatrical release soon.

Committed to fostering new voices, Lough is a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, a longtime mentor at the Sundance Native and Latino Screenwriters Labs, and a former member of Sundance’s Diversity Outreach Committee. He runs a documentary production company, ALL FACTS, with film financier Greg Stewart. Comfortable filming everyone from violent extremists to A-list celebrities and in between, he continues to fuse dynamic storytelling with an abiding curiosity for subcultures, music, and the extremes of human ambition.