Billy Woodberry

*Dallas, 1950

Billy Woodberry is one of the founders of the L.A. rebellion film movement. His first feature Film Bless Their Little Hearts (1983) is a pioneer and essential work of this movement, influenced by Italian neorealism and the work of Third cinema filmmakers. The film was awarded with an OCIC and Interfilm award at the Berlin International Film Festival and was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2013. His latest feature film And when I die, I won’t stay dead (2015) about the Beat poet Bob Kaufmann was the opening-film of MoMA’s Doc Fortnight in 2016.

Woodberry has appeared in Charles Burnett’s When it Rains (1995) and provided narration for Thom Andersen’s Red Hollywood (1996) and James Benning’s Four Corners (1998).

His work has been screened at Cannes and Berlin Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Harvard Film Archive, Camera Austria Symposium, Human Rights Watch Film Festival, Tate Modern and Centre Pompidou.

He received his MFA degree from UCLA in 1982 where he also taught at the School of Theater. Since 1989 Billy Woodberry is a faculty member of the School of Film/​Video and the school of Art at the California Institute of the Arts.