Bill Morrison

Bill Morrison, born in 1965 in Chicago, has been called “the poet laureate of lost films” (New York Times), as he often makes films that reframe long-forgotten moving images. He has premiered feature-length documentary films at the New York, Sundance, Telluride and Venice film festivals. Morrison has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Alpert Award, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, as well as production grants from Creative Capital, the National Endowment for the Arts and Arté – La Lucarne. He had a mid-career retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in 2014. His found footage opus Decasia (2002) was the first film of the 21st century to be named to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. The Great Flood (2013) was recognized with the Smithsonian Ingenuity Award for historical scholarship. Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) was included on over 100 critics’ lists of the best films of the year and was later listed as one of the best films of the decade by the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, and Vanity Fair, among others. In 2021 Morrison became a member of the documentary branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. The Village Detective: a song cycle (2021) had its North American premiere at the 2021 Telluride Film Festival and was released by Kino Lorber theatrically and on home video in North America. His most recent film, Incident (2023) won the Best Short Film Award from International Documentary Association in 2023, the Cinema Eye Honors for Outstanding Nonfiction Short, and was nominated for an Academy Award in Documentary Short in 2025.