Gene Youngblood | |
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Born | Little Rock, Arkansas, U.S. | May 30, 1942
Died | April 6, 2021 Santa Fe, New Mexico, U.S. | (aged 78)
Occupation | Film and culture critic; professor of film and video history, media arts, and media democracy |
Spouses | Nancy Marilyn Youngblood
(m. 1970; div. 1980)Jane Youngblood (m. 2012) |
Website | |
geneyoungblood |
Gene Youngblood (May 30, 1942 – April 6, 2021)[1][2] was an American theorist of media arts and politics, and a respected scholar in the history and theory of alternative cinemas. His best-known book, Expanded Cinema, was the first to consider video as an art form and has been credited with helping to legitimate the fields of computer art and media arts.[3][4] He is also known for his pioneering work in the media democracy movement, a subject on which he taught, wrote, and lectured, beginning in 1967.[4][5][6]
For ten years in the 1960s, Gene Youngblood was a journalist for newspapers, television, and radio in Los Angeles. He was a reporter and film critic for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner (1962–1967), a reporter for KHJ-TV, arts commentator for KPFK, and from 1967 to 1970 he was associate editor and columnist for the Los Angeles Free Press,[7] the first and largest of the underground newspapers of that era.
Youngblood has held several academic posts in his career, but is best known for his time with the Film/Video School at California Institute of the Arts and for helping to found the Moving Image Arts department at the College of Santa Fe.