JOHN TERRY

Professor of Film/Animation/Video, Rhode Island School of Design

Multiple Roles: An independent filmmaker who has made more than 28 films, John Terry has also taught at RISD, Yale, the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee and MIT, where he was instrumental in founding the MIT’s film/video program, with Richard Leacock and Ed Pincus. For more than two decades, he has mentored RISD's Film/Animation/Video students. In 1999 and 2004 Terry was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome, where he first served as a lecturer in 1975. A capable administrator, he served as RISD's Acting Associate Provost in the late 1990s, and was Department Head of Film/Animation/Video from 1995-2001 and was Dean of Fine Arts from 2002 through 2010.

Filmmaking Highlights:

Early in his career, John Terry produced and filmed major portions of the Public Television series, An American Family, a 12-hour, ground breaking, documentary series on the Loud family of California. Terry filmed Lance Loud in New York, Denmark and Paris

Terry was the cinematographer for Les Lolos de Lola, a French feature comedy produced by Francois Truffaut and starring Jean-Pierre Leaud.

For many years Terry worked in association with acclaimed documentary filmmaker John Marshall on a series of films on the !Kung bushmen of Namibia.

Other credits include numerous films on art and architecture, such as Palladio the Architect and His Influence in America and Frank Stella at The Fogg, both distributed by the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Most recently, Terry was director of photography and associate director for Miss BlindSight/The Wingwall Auditions, an award-winning documentary. Much of Terry’s recent work involves video street photography. These films include Colosseum: Prowling a Monument Space and Vedute di Roma.

He is recently completed Italian films in Rome and in Venice.