Recipient of a 2022 Individual Artist grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, Dempsey is currently shooting his independent TV pilot, #Likes4Lucas. Fiscally sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, his #Likes4Lucas script has been a finalist in numerous competitions for both Drama and Comedy, and is featured in Roy W. Dean’s “Hot Films in the Making.”

Dempsey’s work as a film critic and journalist — published in Vanity Fair, Variety, No Film School, Ioncinema, EkkoFilm, Nonfiction.fr and Slate France — has received many thousands of views, shares and likes.  Over the past eight years, he has covered major festivals including Sundance, Cannes, TIFF, SXSW, Tribeca, Annecy, CIFF, Just for Laughs, Fantasia, and more.  His work has been published in the US, Canada, France and Denmark. In the fall of 2019, he was one of the first American critics invited to cover the “Sundance of China”:  the Pingyao International Film Festival. In addition to his reviews, interviews and social analyses, Dempsey has profiled Guillermo Del Toro, Jordan Peele, JJ Abrams, Paul Verhoeven, Agnès Varda, Barry Jenkins and more. 

As a filmmaker, Dempsey writes, produces, edits (and sometimes acts) in viral ad campaigns on TikTok for clients including HP+, Wyshbox, MoFilm and String & Key.  Dempsey has also worked in development:  for Albert Berger & Ron Yerxa at Bona Fide Productions in LA (Little Miss Sunshine, Nebraska, The Leftovers); for Tracey Scoffield & Frank Doelger at Rainmark Films in London (Game of Thrones). Dempsey graduated cum laude from Tufts University in 2015.  As an undergrad, he taught film & TV, both at Tufts and at a film school in Paris—and was awarded Tufts’ first C.J. Saraceno Film Scholarship.