James Fotopoulos was born in Norridge, Illinois in 1976. He attended film classes at
Columbia College in Chicago, but later dropped out. His film Migrating Forms (1999)
won the Best Feature award at the New York Underground Film Festival.
His feature Films have screened internationally at many prestigious
festivals and venues including the International Film Festival
Rotterdam, New York Underground Film Festival, Sundance Channel, Walker
Art Center in Minneapolis (where he was voted "Artist of the Year"),
the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and Chicago Filmmakers.
James Fotopoulos has been compared to the hand crafting avant gardists
like Stan Brakhage, Malcolm Le Grice and Kurt Kren, and revered by top
critics as an artist whose films display strong atmospheres and deal
with sexual and psychological power struggles. He has also directed
over 100 short films.
He was Runner Up in Amy Taubin's Village Voice Year End Top Ten list in
2000, and made the NY Press Year End Top Ten List that same year. In
2002 the Anthology Film Archives sponsored a major retrospective of his
films up to date, and his feature Families was screened in the 2004
Whitney Biennial. In this same year, he received the Creative Capital
Grant for his exploratory presidential biography entitled Richard
Nixon, a 10-hour-plus trans-media corpus in variably exhibitable
sections, and was approached to publish a book of 400 drawings entitled
The Lime Book.
In 2005, Fotopoulos was hired by Barney Rosset, famed publisher of the
Evergreen Review (providing the first widespread domestic access to
literary figures like Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco and Harold Pinter), to
direct a short film of an Ionesco short story in a triptych of films
known as the Evergreen Trilogy premiering at the MOMA in May 2006.
Also a renowned multi media artist, he recently completed an
installation for the 2005 Contour Biennial for Video Art.
