About Rick Ross

Rick Ross is an artist, filmmaker, and New York Times Best Selling graphic novelist.

In 2012, he began a collaboration with Academy Award-winning filmmaker Kevin Costner and acclaimed writer Jon Baird to create a part novel, part graphic novel series entitled The Explorers Guild. For the first volume, Rick produced over 600 pages of comics and illustrations, including six full color oil paintings. The Explorers Guild: Volume One: A Passage to Shambhala was released in October 2015 by Atria Books / Simon & Schuster to glowing notices from Kirkus Reviews, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, and more. In November 2015, the book made the New York Times Best Seller list for Print Hardcover Fiction, and it has since been translated into Czech, Hungarian, and Chinese. The paperback edition was released in October 2016.

Rick has been illustrating comics and graphic novels since 2005. Among these, he was the lead artist and character designer for the graphic novel of the Spike TV television show 1000 Ways to Die. For HBO and IDW he helped develop two proposed comics series based on the hit show The Sopranos. For BOOM! Studios he created concept art, character designs, and pencils for an adaption of the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. For IDW and the BBC he produced character designs for two series of comics adapting the TV show Doctor Who. For Vin Di Bona Productions (creators of America’s Funniest Home Videos) he helped turn their film property Urban Monsters into a comics series for Image Comics. And for M2 Studios he helped invent a process to create animated motion comics, including an animated sequence for the Cinemax television show Femme Fatales, a proposed motion comic for the Showtime television show Dexter, and the world’s first anaglyph-3D motion comic, DeadTown, published by 12-Gauge Comics. Between 2008 and 2012, he published the online graphic fiction anthology Agitainment Comics.

Since 2008, Rick has also worked in Hollywood producing storyboards, concept art, character designs, and other visual development for films, commercials, music videos, animation, gaming, and interactive. Clients include Tig Productions, Treehouse Films, Petrol Advertising, Fintu Films, O2A Media, Wildworx, IAG, Warner Bros. Interactive, Vigil Games, Ultimate Fighting Championship, and Turtle Beach Corp.

Rick is also an accomplished filmmaker and MFA graduate of the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. He has directed or been cinematographer on more than twenty film and television productions, written eight feature films and dozens of shorts, screened in competition at more than 40 festivals worldwide, and won numerous awards. His short film Backslide starring Felicia Day (Mystery Science Theater 3000) was named by the American Cinematheque as one of the eight best comedy shorts of the year and distributed internationally. His most recent film, Tesla—which he wrote, produced, directed, edited, sound designed, and created the visual effects for—won Best of the Fest at the Copa Shorts Fest and Best Comedy Short at the Culver City Film Festival.

Rick is an Assistant Professor at the New York Film Academy College of Visual and Performing Arts and serves on the advisory board for the School of Visual Studies at the University of Missouri.