Wheeler Winston Dixon is a teacher, filmmaker, the author of more than thirty books, and over a hundred articles. He has taught film history, film production and film and video theory at Rutgers University, The New School, The University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and The University of Amsterdam. You can see a portfolio of his newest video work here.
As a film and video artist, Dixon's films have been screened at The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, LA Filmforum (Los Angeles), Anthology Film Archives, Filmhuis Cavia (Amsterdam), Studio 44 (Stockholm), La lumière collective (Montréal), The BWA Katowice Museum (Poland), Vastlab (Los Angeles), The Microscope Gallery, The National Film Theatre (UK), The Jewish Museum, The Nelson - Atkins Museum, Millennium Film Workshop, The San Francisco Cinématheque, The Maryland Institute College of Art, The New Arts Lab, The Collective for Living Cinema, The Kitchen, The Filmmakers Cinématheque, Film Forum, The Amos Eno Gallery, Sla 307 Art Space, The Gallery of Modern Art, The Rice Museum, The Oberhausen Film Festival, Experimental Response Cinema and elsewhere.
From 1999 to 2014, he was the co-editor in chief (with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster) of the journal Quarterly Review of Film and Video. He has been quoted by The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Fast Company, The New York Times, the BBC, CNN, The Christian Science Monitor, US News and World Report, The Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, The PBS Newshour, USA Today and many other national media outlets on digital cinema, film and related topics.
In 2003, Dixon was honored with a retrospective of his films at The Museum of Modern Art, and his films were acquired for the permanent collection of the Museum, in both print and original format. In 2024, his new video work - more than 800 videos in all - was added to the permanent collection of the UCLA Film & Television Archive in Los Angeles.
His many books include Synthetic Cinema: The 21st Century Movie Machine (2019),
The Films of Terence Fisher: Hammer Horror and Beyond (2017),
A Brief History of Comic Book Movies (2017, co-authored with Richard Graham),
Black & White Cinema: A Short History (2015), Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s (2015),
Cinema at The Margins (2013), Streaming: Movies, Media and Instant Access (2013);
Death of the Moguls: The End of Classical Hollywood (2012); 21st Century Hollywood: Movies in the Era of Transformation (2011, co-authored with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster); Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia (2009), and The Films of Jean-Luc Godard (1997).
His articles have appeared in Senses of Cinema, Cinéaste, Interview, Film Quarterly, Literature/Film Quarterly, Films in Review, Post Script, Journal of Film and Video, Film Criticism, New Orleans Review, Film International, Flow, Film and Philosophy and other journals.
Dixon's classic book A History of Horror (2010) was revised and updated for a
second edition, published by Rutgers University Press in 2023.
Dixon’s textbook A Short History of Film (2008, co-authored with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster) was reprinted six times through 2012. A second, revised edition was published in 2013; the third revised edition was published in 2018. A fourth edition covering filmmaking during the pandemic will appear in 2025. The book is a required text in universities throughout the world.
In 2015, with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, he inaugurated Quick Takes: Movies and Popular Culture for Rutgers University Press, a new series of books on film and popular culture; to date, more than twenty titles have been published in the series.
For more information on Dixon and his work, click here.
Wheeler Winston Dixon
Film and Digital Historian / Video Artist