Gene Youngblood

Gene Youngblood (May 30, 1942 – April 6, 2021) was an American theorist of media arts and politics, and a respected scholar in the history and theory of alternative cinemas. His best-known book, *Expanded Cinema*, was the first to consider video as an art form. He has been credited with helping to define and legitimate the fields of computer art and digital art. For ten years in the 1960s, Gene Youngblood was a journalist for newspapers, television, and radio in Los Angeles. He was a reporter and film critic for the *Los Angeles Herald-Examiner* (1962–1967), a reporter for KHJ-TV, arts commentator for KPFK, and from 1967 to 1970 he was associate editor and columnist for the *Los Angeles Free Press*, the first and largest of the underground newspapers of that era. He is also known for his pioneering work in the media democracy movement, a subject on which he taught, wrote, and lectured, beginning in 1967. Youngblood has held several academic posts in his career, but is best known for his time with the Film/Video School at California Institute of the Arts and for helping to found the Moving Image Arts department at the College of Santa Fe.