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Stephen Gaghan (born May 6, 1965, Louisville, Kentucky) is an Academy Award and Emmy Award-winning American film writer and director.

He won the Academy Award for best screenplay on Steven Soderbergh's film Traffic (2000). He also directed and wrote the screenplays for Syriana (2005) and Abandon (2002). Other writing credits include Havoc (2005), The Alamo (2004) and Rules of Engagement (2000), as well as a handful of episodes of various television series. Gaghan recently turned down the chance to adapt Dan Brown's novel, The Da Vinci Code.

In his television writing career, he won an Emmy Award for co-writing a NYPD Blue episode entitled Where's Swaldo, in 1997. In addition to NYPD Blue, he has also written for The Practice and New York Undercover.

As a filmmaker, Gaghan is generally regarded as one of the two precursors of the style known as hyperlink cinema, along with the Alejandro González Iñarritu/Guillermo Arriaga writer-director team of Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel. Most especially, Syriana's barely comprehensibly narrative, which mimics the confusion and lack of information of the characters yet manages to capture the complexity and feel of being in its particular milieu, is considered a prime example of the hyperlink film.

Starting Wednesday November 15 2006, Nintendo will start running a series of TV commercials for Wii directed by Academy Award winner Stephen Gaghan. These commercials all together have a total budget of over US$200 million. The productions will be the first broad-based advertising Nintendo has ever done, and will include a two-minute 'documentary' showing off grandparents and parents enjoying Wii with their children. 80% of advertising will target adults, in an attempt to expand the market beyond Nintendo's traditional audience.

His next project is a film adaptation of Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. The film is to star Leonardo Di Caprio.

In his final days of high school upon graduation, Gaghan was expelled for driving a go-cart through the halls of his high school. He is also a recovering drug addict and was a straight-A student. During the release of Traffic, someone commented on one of the teen characters in the movie who is a drug addict and a straight-A student, calling it unrealistic, which Gaghan defended by stating that he had straight-A's while he was living through a drug nightmare in school also.

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