Erik Voake

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Erik Voake (born 1973) is an American filmmaker and photographer from Yorba Linda, California. He studied Outdoor Leadership at Western State College of Colorado and lived in Crested Butte. With an Arriflex 16mm camera, he started making action-sports films while pursuing whitewater kayaking, creating The Fix after traveling through Peru, West Virginia, and Colorado. He helped launch Slednecks, a freestyle snowmobile series that became a major draw at the Winter X Games on ESPN, and later produced and edited five Crusty Demons of Dirt films.

Voake worked with Zalman King to produce Murder For Hire, a documentary on Body Count featuring Ice-T. He directed two music videos, Chamber of Fear for Nike/LeBron and Unleash Me for Jet Li’s Unleashed. He produced and shot A Day in the Life, a hip-hop-era feature directed by Sticky Fingaz and distributed by Lions Gate. He also collaborated with Larry Clark on Impaled, shown at Sundance, Cannes, Locarno, and the Tate Modern.

In 2007 he created Crusty’s Dirt Demons for FUSE Networks, the network’s top new series in its debut season, which ran for two seasons. As a photographer, he built his reputation with a Roxy Theatre project on the Sunset Strip that helped launch his career with SPIN Magazine. His clients include Rolling Stone, Billboard, Red Bull, HARD Events, and Porter Robinson; he has photographed Obama and Noam Chomsky. He’s working on a book of Roxy photos with exhibits and representation by Guy Oseary’s Rock Paper Photo.

Since 2010 he has continued producing and directing action-sports documentaries and music videos for MTV, remaining a key figure in Crusty Demons and in collaboration with Larry Clark.