Before Gabriel Bologna’s career as a writer/director, he was an accomplished actor for fifteen years, working with such film directors as Francis Ford Coppola and Mark Rydel. He was discovered by James Burrows while attending New York University Tisch and was flown out to Universal Studios to star in the ABC series, “The Marshall Chronicles”, where he played the loveable tough guy, Jonny Parmetko. The New York Times reviewed Gabriel’s role as “a brilliant Fonzi redux specimen”. Though it only ran a season, the show has been immortalized on Wikipedia as being the impetus for Larry David changing the name “The Seinfeld Chronicles” to “Seinfeld” as to not compete with Gabriel’s show which had been launched at the exact same time.

In 1994 Gabriel co-wrote an autobiographical comedy called “Love Is All There Is” (Samuel Goldwyn) with his parents, screen legends Renee Taylor and Joseph Bologna, starring Angelina Jolie. It was a modern-day Romeo and Juliet that took place in the Bronx and was quoted as “wickedly funny” in the New York Times.

In 1996, Bologna wrote the film “The Elevator” for an HBO Original Release, starring himself, Martin Landau, Martin Sheen, and Richard Lewis. It’s a touching comedy about a struggling writer who traps a big-time producer in an elevator and forces him to listen to all the shorts he’s written.

In 2010 Gabriel directed the horror-comedy, “Boston Girls” starring Danny Trejo, and the 2013 Gabriel directed a horror film called, “The Black Waters Of Echo’s Pond,” starring Robert Patrick, released by Anchor Bay.

In 2014, Gabriel directed a film adaptation of the play “African Gothic,” by Reza De Wet, South Africa’s most celebrated author. Written in 1985 at the height of censorship, this masterpiece was an instrumental weapon in the literary war that toppled Apartheid. The story, itself, centers around a weapon: the Sjombok, a long flesh-tearing whip, the ubiquitous symbol of Apartheid, and synonymous with the oppression by those who wielded it. The film won over a dozen film festival awards.

Gabriel directed a dance comedy in Brooklyn, NY, called “Tango Shalom”, about a Hasidic rabbi who struggles with his orthodox beliefs to realize his dream of dancing the tango. It was released in theaters in the US on September 3rd by Vision Films with the highest box office receipts of any independent film in 2021.. The film was produced by Joel Zwick (”My Big Fat Greek Wedding”), starring Karina Smirnoff (longest-running Alumna on “Dancing With The Stars”), and Lanie Kazan (”My Big Fat Greek Wedding”). The film recently won the A.F.I. World Peace Initiative Award for Best World Peace & Tolerance Narrative Feature Film at the Cannes Film Festival, and won Best Comedy at the Montreal International Film Festival.

Aside from studying at NYU Tisch, Gabriel is proud to have been under the tutelage of auteur, John Frankenheimer, and opera impresario, Albert Innaurato. Gabriel was a professor of filmmaking for ten years at the UCLA Extension Entertainment Studies Department. Jon Levin, who ran CAA for twenty-nine years, is Gabriel’s manager.