“Josh has a fervor for television. What’s more, he understands the type of honest, innovative and immersive multi-platform programming that is essential for today’s audience,” says Ellerbee.

Veselka is a twelve-year veteran of Lucky Duck Productions, and a nearly twenty-year veteran of the television industry. While forming new partnerships, tackling new formats and new media, and working up new projects for development, Josh also continues to produce shows for Lucky Duck. Having just completed “Studs Terkel: Listening to America,” a documentary for HBO on the life and art of the late American icon, he moved onto “America’s Forgotten Children: The Rural Poor,” a timely documentary for Nickelodeon on rural poverty and those living in crisis well before the current recession.

Among other awards, Veselka is a two-time Emmy winning, five-time Emmy nominated television producer, who, during his tenure at Lucky Duck, has produced, directed and shot numerous documentaries, biographies, specials and segments covering a wide variety of topics and subjects.

In 2008, he spent a month in India producing “The Untouchable Kids of India,” which went on to win the Emmy for Outstanding Children’s Programming for Nickelodeon’s “Nick News with Linda Ellerbee.” He has produced two shows on the Middle East Crisis, filming in Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. In 2004, he traveled extensively in South Africa producing “The Courage to Live: Kids, South Africa and AIDS,” which went on to earn him another Emmy nomination. And in January of 2002, he produced his first Emmy winning program “Faces of Hope: the Kids of Afghanistan,” about the plight of kids who live in a nation that has never known peace in their lifetime.

Veselka has produced programs focusing on environmental concerns and cultural awareness, traveling to Japan to see what life is like for American kids that live abroad, to Kenya for a unique safari experience and down the Peruvian Amazon, exploring the rainforest and the threats it faces.

He has tackled the AIDS epidemic in the US, producing a show that profiled what life here is like for teenagers living with the disease. He traveled the country to produce the Emmy nominated “There’s No Place Like Home: Homeless Kids in America,” and spent time in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans to produce “Children of the Storm,” a special about the survivors and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Veselka has also produced multiple biographies, including ones on Muhammad Ali, Rosie O’Donnell and Dudley Moore, for both Nickelodeon and MSNBC.

Veselka attended New York University and received further training at the Film and Video Arts and Global Village School of Documentary Video. Veselka began his career in television as a runner for NBC at the 1988 Republican Presidential Convention in New Orleans, and from there, like many in the industry, went on to do freelance work for commercials, industrials, PSA’s and music videos, including the B-52’s “Is that you, Mo-Dean” and “Illimatic” from the then named “Nasty Nas” debut solo album.

Veselka lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with his wife Rebecca and their three boys, twins Gabriel & Ruben and Milo.