Josh Kornbluth is an American comedic autobiographical monologist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has toured internationally, written and starred in several feature films, and starred in a television interview show. Kornbluth was raised in New York City, the son of a public-school teacher. He attended Princeton University for a time, but left before graduating to pursue work in journalism. He ultimately moved to San Francisco “in the hopes of launching a career in the theater.” 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 to develop science-based solutions for the improvement of brain health in diverse populations across the world. GBHI’s founding sites at UCSF and Trinity College Dublin collaborate in educating leaders (known as Atlantic Fellows for Equity in Brain Health) across the world about ways to carry out research, deliver health care, train and educate, and change policies and practices in their regions. Kornbluth’s knowledge of the brain and “its many diseases” developed during four years of “all brain, all the time,” led to his one-man show “Citizen Brain,” created in collaboration with director Casey Stangl and Aaron Loeb. It debuted (virtually, due to the pandemic) in October 2020 at the Ashby Stage in Berkeley. The show later enjoyed a full theatrical premiere, and a series of online videos, also called “Citizen Brain,” was launched. Kornbluth is also completing a new one-man show, The Bottomless Bowl, based on his experiences at the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco, where he served as artist-in-residence and continued for years as a volunteer.

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—that was a hit off-Broadway) 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. In recent years, he has bicycled “a lot” with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training program that facilitates fundraising for research and advancements in the fight against cancer. 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. Kornbluth 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.