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Thom Andersen is a filmmaker, film critic and teacher. He attended Berkeley in the early 1960s and then returned to his hometown of Los Angeles to attend USC School of Cinematic Arts, where he studied with Arthur Knight and eventually assisted on Knight's project THE HISTORY OF SEX IN CINEMA. While at USC Andersen met long-time friend and collaborator Morgan Fisher, who assisted on Andersen's student film MELTING, a portrait of a sundae. He regularly attended local screening series including shows by the Trak Film Group and Movies 'Round Midnight and famously wrote about an unpopular screening of Andy Warhol's SLEEP. After USC, Andersen attended UCLA and completed his experimental documentaries OLIVIA'S PLACE and EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE, ZOOPRAXOGRAPHER. During the 1970s his films screened at venues including Los Angeles' Theatre Vanguard and San Francisco's Pacific Film Archive.
He currently teaches film theory and history at the California Institute of the Arts, and has previously taught at the SUNY Buffalo and Ohio State University. In the early 60's, He has also been the programmer for LA Filmforum in Los Angeles during the late 90's. His more recent work, including Los Angeles Plays Itself, has taken its cues from Formalism. The film won the National Film Board Award for Best Documentary at the 2003 Vancouver International Film Festival and was voted best documentary of 2004 by the Village Voice Critic's Poll. In 2010 he completed GET OUT OF THE CAR, a portrait of signs and abandoned spaces set to Los Angeles music. In spring 2012 Andersen took active part in the three month exposition of Whitney Biennial.
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