Jonas Mekas

Artistic Director. Jonas Mekas is a Lithuanian filmmaker, writer, and curator who has been called the godfather of American avant-garde cinema. He became editor of Film Culture in 1954, and in 1958 began writing his Movie Journal column for The Village Voice. In 1962, he co-founded Film-Makers' Cooperative (FMC) and the Filmmaker's Cinematheque in 1964, which eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives. In 1970, Anthology Film Archives opened as a film museum, screening space, and a library, with Mekas as its director. Mekas, along with Stan Brakhage, Ken Kelman, Peter Kubelka, James Broughton, and P. Adams Sitney, began the ambitious Essential Cinema project at Anthology Film Archives to establish a canon of important cinematic works. Mekas' own output ranging from narrative films (Guns of the Trees, 1961) to documentaries (The Brig, 1963) and to diaries such as Walden (1969); Lost, Lost, Lost (1975); Reminiscences of a Voyage to Lithuania (1972) and Zefiro torna (1992) have been screened extensively. Since the 1970s, he has taught film courses at the New School for Social Research, MIT, Cooper Union, and New York University.