American comedic monologist Josh Kornbluth has performed and toured internationally with one-man autobiographical stage pieces since 1989. The son of a public-school teacher, Kornbluth was raised in New York City. He attended Princeton University, but left before graduating to work in journalism. He later moved to San Francisco (“in the hopes of launching a career in the theater”), where his career as a writer and teller of stories began. In 2001, Kornbluth and his brother Jake collaborated on their first movie, Haiku Tunnel, released nationally by Sony Pictures Classics. Their second collaboration, Love & Taxes, was released in 2017.

Kornbluth served for four years as an Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health at the Global Brain Health Institute, founded in 2015. Based in two placed—the Memory and Aging Center (MAC) at UCSF and the Neurology Department at Trinity College Dublin—GBHI runs a fellowship program that trains leaders from diverse backgrounds and then sends them back to their respective regions to promote equity in brain health. Knowledge gleaned over those years of “all brain, all the time” led to Kornbluth’s one-man show “Citizen Brain,” created in collaboration with director Casey Stangl and literary advisor Aaron Loeb. The resulting work—originally scheduled to debut at Berkeley’s Ashby Stage—debuted virtually in October 2020 courtesy of the pandemic. The show later enjoyed a full theatrical premiere, and a series of online videos also called “Citizen Brain” was launched. Kornbluth is currently finishing a new one-man show, The Bottomless Bowl, based on his experiences at the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco, where he had served as artist-in-residence before continuing as a volunteer for many years.

Kornbluth has also produced two concert films, each a one-man show now available online. The Red Diaper Baby (a wildly comic coming-of-age tale—for mature audiences only!) was a hit “off-Broadway” at the Actors’ Playhouse in Greenwich Village. ) and The Mathematics of Change (an uproarious and moving story of a young, aspiring mathematician who unexpectedly discovers his limits as a Princeton University freshman—filmed in the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley).

For two years, Kornbluth hosted an interview show—The Josh Kornbluth Show—on public TV station KQED in San Francisco, and “for a time” was on Berkely’s Energy Commission. Since 2012 he has participated in the annual Team in Training endurance bike ride, a fundraiser for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. He additionally started a Substack called “But Not Enough About Me” about two years ago. He lives in Berkeley with his wife Sara, a retired public-school teacher, both (as is their son, Guthrie) passionate Golden State Warriors fans. He is still planning to complete his senior thesis for Princeton, and has resumed practicing the instrument of his youth, the oboe—not to mention getting back into the masochistic habit of making oboe reeds.