Joe Penna

Jônatas de Moura Penna, best known as Joe Penna (born May 29, 1987), is a Brazilian filmmaker and musician, best known from both his YouTube channel MysteryGuitarMan and his feature films. He resides in Los Angeles, California.

Film
In March 2016, his short film Turning Point was selected to play at the Tribeca Film Festival.

In February 2017, Penna began production of his directorial debut feature film, Arctic. It was shot in Iceland and stars Mads Mikkelsen. Arctic garnered enthusiastic reviews as an Official Selection for the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. Its theatrical premiere was on February 1, 2019.

In June 2019, Penna began shooting on the sci-fi movie Stowaway starring Anna Kendrick and Toni Collette.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the release of Stowaway was delayed from its initial summer 2020 release by Sony. Netflix subsequently acquired the rights to the film, which achieved the #1 spot worldwide. This success led Netflix to also acquire the US rights to Penna's earlier film Arctic, which similarly achieved #1 ranking in the country.

In August 2022, Penna signed on to direct the sci-fi thriller Trespasser, produced by Jason Fuchs and Brad Fuller. The film, based on a Black List screenplay follows a father and daughter living in isolation who encounter a mysterious otherworldly creature.

In December 2022, Penna was tapped to produce Anna Kendrick's directorial debut Woman of the Hour. The thriller, based on the true story of Cheryl Bradshaw, a bachelorette on the 1970s TV matchmaking show The Dating Game whose chosen bachelor turned out to be serial killer Rodney Alcala, was acquired by multiple international distributors at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film sold to Netflix for $11M and debuted with a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

YouTube
Penna maintains the YouTube channel MysteryGuitarMan. He registered the channel on June 16, 2006.

By January 2011, MysteryGuitarMan became the most subscribed channel in Brazil. , his channel has garnered over 2.6 million subscribers, and his videos have accrued nearly 400 million views.

On September 11, 2005, Penna launched a second YouTube channel, where he uploads his making-of videos and vlogs. Within 6 hours, it became the third most subscribed channel in Brazil.

In 2007, Penna was one of the first YouTube channels to receive mainstream media coverage, including attention from DC Fox News, after his video The Puzzle was featured on the front page of YouTube.

In 2009, Penna was again seen on the front page of YouTube with his video Guitar: Impossible, which has been covered by De Wereld Draait Door, the highest-rated primetime show in the Netherlands. On December 6, 2009, Penna was featured on FM4, an Austrian national radio station. Shortly after uploaded, his "Guitar: Impossible" video was featured on the MSN.com front page.

Best Buy announced Penna as the $15,000 winner of their Tech-U-Out Video Challenge. He was also a finalist in the "Oreo Global Moments" video competition. Ford selected Penna as a Fiesta Agent for the 2009 Ford Fiesta Movement. Penna's "Guitar: Impossible" video was also featured by YouTube as one of the best videos of 2009.

In 2010, Penna's Root Beer Mozart was featured on CNN's morning show Morning Express with Robin Meade and on Germany's nationally broadcast Taff show.

Television
In 2009, Penna directed a commercial starring Rhett and Link titled T-Shirt War. It garnered international attention. Shortly after, Penna was selected as one of the top 10 new directors at the 20th Cannes Lions Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors' Showcase.

Following the success of the original, Penna and the original cast were hired to produce a national television and cinema spot for Coca-Cola and McDonald's. A year later, Penna directed and starred in yet another commercial for the two companies.

In June 2010, Penna was highlighted by CNN Money on their Best Jobs series.

His stop-motion short film Guitar: Impossible was selected to be displayed at the Guggenheim museum.

In 2012, Penna co-wrote and directed an original interactive thriller series titled Meridian starring Orlando Jones and Rick Overton in conjunction with Fourth Wall Studios.

In August 2014, Penna was announced as the host of Xploration Earth 2050, a technology-oriented television series. Xploration Station went on to receive eight Daytime Emmy Award nominations.

Generative AI
In May 2023, Penna was part of a team that authored a paper on text-to-image generation which introduced PickScore, a scoring function showing superior performance in predicting human preferences. The team recommended using PickScore for evaluating future text-to-image generation models and using Pick-a-Pic prompts as a more relevant metric than the commonly used MS-COCO and Fréchet inception distance, the latter showing a negative correlation correlated to human preferences. This paper was followed by the release of another paper detailing improvements to latent diffusion models for high-resolution image synthesis.

Upon the peer review and acceptance of these papers as a scientific publication, Penna will have an Erdős–Bacon number of 7.