Bill Nichols (2019)

Bill Nichols is Professor of Cinema at San Francisco State University, a position he has held in 1987. Prior to that, he was a member of the Queen’s University Film Studies Department, where he was Acting Chair from 1976-8 and Chair from 1978-1985. He is a founder of the contemporary study of documentary film. His 1991 book Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary applied modern film theory to the study of documentary film for the first time and helped to establish film studies as an academic discipline. He also wrote Newsreel: Documentary Filmmaking on the American Left (1980) and Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture (1994), Nichols has lectured in numerous countries, served on many film festival juries, and published numerous articles. He also consults regularly on a variety of filmmaking projects, He is former President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and a former advisor to the American Film Institute. He has worked as a consultant on numerous documentary filmmaking projects, including an exploration of the human consequences of the Wounded Knee massacre as well as an environmental, interactive journey down the Mississippi River from its headwaters to the Gulf.