Sidney Peterson (November 15, 1905 – April 24, 2000), was an American writer,artist,avant-gardefilmmaker, and educator. He founded the first film courses at theCalifornia School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute) in 1947.[1]
Sidney Peterson was born on November 15, 1905, inOakland, California. He attendedUC Berkeley, worked as a newspaperreporter inMonterey, and spent time as a practicingpainter andsculptor inFrance in the 1920s and 1930s.
AfterWorld War II, Peterson founded Workshop 20 at the California School of Fine Arts (renamed the San Francisco Art Institute), initiating filmmaking courses at the school.[2]
Between 1947 and 1950 the workshop produced five films under Peterson's guidance that were influential on the burgeoning American avant-garde cinema, and significant artifacts of theSan Francisco Renaissance.[3][4] In the years that followed, Peterson worked as a consultant for theMuseum of Modern Art, made a series ofdocumentary films, penned a novel (A Fly in the Pigment, 1961) and a memoir (The Dark of the Screen, 1980), and worked atWalt Disney Productions as a scriptwriter and storyboard artist on the never completed sequel toFantasia.[5]
He died on April 24, 2000, inNew York City,New York, at the age of 94.
Peterson's films are distributed byCanyon Cinema in San Francisco andThe Film Makers Cooperative in New York City.[6] A 2007 comic strip by Dave Kiersh in Syncopated Volume 3 (Syncopated Comics, 2007) tells of his relationship with Peterson, who was a friend of Kiersh's grandmother.[7][8] On December 30, 2009, theLibrary of Congress named Peterson'sThe Lead Shoes (1949) to theNational Film Registry.[9][10]
Angel Island Publications[11]
Anthology Film Archives and New York University Press
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