Bill Morrison

Bill Morrison (born November 17, 1965) is an American, New York–based filmmaker and artist. His films often combine rare archival material set to contemporary music, and have been screened in theaters, cinemas, museums, galleries, and concert halls around the world. Morrison was born in Chicago, Illinois. He attended Reed College from 1983 to 1985, and graduated with a BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art in 1989. He received the President's Citation from Cooper Union in 2016. Morrison had a mid-career retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art, October 2014 – March 2015. He is a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and has received the Alpert Awards in the Arts, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (2003).His theatrical projection design with Ridge Theater has been recognized with two Bessie Awards, and an Obie Award.Morrison has collaborated with some of the most influential composers and performers of our time, including John Adams, Gavin Bryars, Bill Frisell, Philip Glass, Michael Gordon, Henryk Górecki, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Kronos Quartet, David Lang, Steve Reich, & Julia Wolfe among many others. Decasia (2002), his feature-length collaboration with composer Michael Gordon, was selected by the Library of Congress to its National Film Registry in 2013, becoming the first film of the 21st century selected to the list. It has been hailed by J. Hoberman as "the most widely acclaimed American avant-garde film of the fin-de-siècle." The director Errol Morris reportedly commented while viewing Decasia that "This may be the greatest movie ever made". The film was originally commissioned by the Basel Sinfonietta to be shown on three screens surrounding the audience, behind which 55 musicians performed Michael Gordon's score. In 2011, Spark of Being, a collaboration with composer/trumpeter Dave Douglas, won The Douglas Edwards Experimental/Independen