Contributor

Ken Jacobs is a legendary avant-garde filmmaker, whose work has screened across the world in venues such as the Louvre, the Museum of Modern Art, the Cinemathèque Française, and the New York Film Festival. In addition to his widely seen and deeply influential film and video works, Jacobs is a pioneer of projector-based art. His performances of the Nervous Magic Lantern, which are live film-less films push abstraction well past the limits of his painterly predecessors: Hans Hoffman, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, among others.

Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Ken Jacobs, was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1933. He studied painting with one of the prime creators of Abstract Expressionism, Hans Hofmann, in the mid-fifties. It was then that he also began filmmaking (Star Spangled To Death). His personal star rose, to just about knee high, with the sixties advent of Underground Film. In 1967, with the involvement of his wife Florence and many others aspiring to a democratic—rather than demagogic—cinema, he created The Millennium Film Workshop in New York City. A nonprofit filmmaker's co-operative open to all, it made available film equipment, workspace, screenings and classes at little or no cost.