Sidney Peterson (November 15, 1905,
Oakland, California – April 24, 2000,
New York City) was an American writer,
artist
An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse refers to a practitioner in the visual arts only. However, th ...
, and
avant-garde filmmaker. He attended
UC Berkeley, worked as a newspaper
reporter
A journalist is an individual that collects/gathers information in form of text, audio, or pictures, processes them into a news-worthy form, and disseminates it to the public. The act or process mainly done by the journalist is called journalism ...
in
Monterey, and spent time as a practicing
painter
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called the "matrix" or "support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and ai ...
and
sculptor in
France in the 1920s and 1930s. After
World War II, Peterson founded Workshop 20 at the
California School of Fine Arts (renamed the
San Francisco Art Institute
San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) was a private college of contemporary art in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1871, SFAI was one of the oldest art schools in the United States and the oldest west of the Mississippi River. Approximately ...
), initiating filmmaking courses at the school.
Between 1947 and 1950 the workshop produced five films under Peterson's guidance that were influential on the burgeoning American avant-garde cinema, and significant artifacts of the
San Francisco Renaissance. In the years that followed, Peterson worked as a consultant for the
Museum of Modern Art, made a series of
documentary films, penned a novel (''A Fly in the Pigment'', 1961) and a memoir (''The Dark of the Screen'', 1980), and worked at