Chris Carter is the creator and executive producer of The X-Files, as well as one of its main writers (approximately seven episodes each season) and occasional director. Carter is the recipient of a 1995 Emmy Award nomination for "Outstanding Writing in a Dramatic Series" for an episode he wrote and directed entitled "Duane Barry."

Carter developed the idea for The X-Files in 1992 after he entered into an exclusive deal with Twentieth Television (now Twentieth Century Fox Television) to create and develop television projects. When asked by Twentieth president Peter Roth to describe the type of show he wanted to create, his response was immediate: "I want to make a show that will scare people the way Night Stalker scared me when I was a teenager." That show would become The X-Files.

Born and raised in southern California, Carter has been writing for most of his adult life. Formerly a freelance journalist and editor of Surfing magazine, Carter began his career as a screenwriter in 1985 at the Walt Disney Studios, where he was brought in by Jeffrey Katzenberg to write for television. At Disney, Carter wrote and produced several television movies, in addition to the television pilot "Cameo by Night" for NBC and "The Nanny" (not the CBS series) for the Disney Channel. Carter took a short leave of absence from Disney to co-produce the second season of the NBC comedy Rags to Riches, starring Joe Bologna, and returned in 1989 to create and executive-produce Brand New Life, a recurring comedy series that ran as part of a rotating schedule on Disney's Sunday night lineup.

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