Gene Youngblood

Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

Gene Youngblood (1942-2021) was an internationally known theorist of media arts and politics and a respected scholar in the history and theory of alternative cinemas. His "Expanded Cinema" (1970), the first book to consider video as an art form, was seminal in establishing media arts as a recognized artistic and scholarly discipline. The term “expanded cinema” has become generic, and the book is considered a classic. Youngblood was also widely known as a pioneering voice in the media democracy movement and taught, wrote, curated, and lectured on media democracy and alternative cinemas since 1970. Youngblood lectured at more than four hundred colleges and universities throughout North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia, and his writing is published extensively around the world. In the 1960s Youngblood was a journalist for newspapers, television, and radio in Los Angeles -- reporter and film critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner; reporter for KHJ-TV, and arts commentator for KPFK, Pacifica Radio. From 1967 to 1970, he was associate editor and columnist for the Los Angeles Free Press, the first and largest of the underground newspapers of that era. Youngblood was a founding member in 1970 of the Faculty of Film and Video at the California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts), where he taught for nineteen years. He also taught at the California Institute of Technology, Columbia University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and in the film departments at UCLA and USC. In 1988, he joined the founding faculty of the Department of Moving Image Arts at the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico, where he taught for nineteen years until retiring in 2007.