biography | films | distribution | correspondence
Wheeler Winston Dixon is the Chairperson of the Film Studies Program at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. He teaches courses in film history, theory and criticism at UNL from the undergraduate to the graduate levels, as well as advising students. During the 1960s he worked as an experimental filmmaker in New York, then moved to Los Angeles and London in the late 60s and early 70s to work within the film industry. He left Hollywood in 1976 after a career as a post-production supervisor to pursue a career in academe.
Dixon received his Ph.D. in English from Rutgers University in 1982, and is the author of ten books. Most recently, he has published Re-Viewing British Cinema: 1900-1992 (1994) from State University of New York Press, a critical anthology on the history of the British film; and It Looks at You: Notes on the Returned Gaze of Cinema, also from SUNY UP, on recent developments in interactive cinema. Dr. Dixon's other books include The Early Film Criticism of Francois Truffaut (Indiana University Press, 1993). His next books will be The Films of Jean-Luc Godard (SUNY UP), forthcoming in 1996, on the life and works of the noted French filmmaker, and The Exploding Eye: A Re-Visionary History of the American Experimental Cinema (SUNY UP).
In 1995, Dixon was named Editor of the State University of New York Press Cultural Studies in Cinema/Video Series, to create a new group of books on cinema/video theory and practice. Commissioned volumes thus far include: PostNegritude Visual and Literary Culture by Mark A. Reid; Digital Diasporics: Reimaging Africanity in Cyberspace by Anna Everett; Production Theory of the Hollywood Cinema by Jean-Pierre Geuens; Dialectics of Death: The Films of Sam Peckinpah by Stephen Prince; and Women Filmmakers and the Politics of Gender in Third Cinema, edited by Diana Robin and Ira Jaffe.
Dixon is the author of more than fifty articles on film theory, history and criticism, which have appeared in Cineaste, Interview, Literature/Film Quarterly, Films in Review, Post Script, Journal of Film and Video, Film Criticism, New Orleans Review, Classic Images, Film and Philosophy and numerous other journals. He is a member of the editorial board of Film Criticism. Most recently, Dixon has published "Maureen Blackwood, Isaac Julien and the Sanfoka Collective," Film Criticism 20.1/2 (Fall-Winter 1995-96): 131-143 and "The Digital Domain: Image Mesh and Manipulation in Hyperreal Cinema/Video," Film Criticism 20.1/2 (Fall-Winter l995-96): 55-66, as part of a Special Double Issue of Film Criticism on New Film Theory, which he guest edited.
Dixon has also served as a Guest Film Programmer at The National Film Theatre of the British Film Institute in London as a lecturer, in addition to creating seasons of film programs on Dystopian Science Fiction films and the films of Terence Fisher, as well as conducting an on-stage interview with two-time Academy Award-winning director/cinematographer Freddie Francis (for GLORY and SONS AND LOVERS).
As a film and video maker, Dixon's feature and short films include WHAT CAN I DO?, SERIAL METAPHYSICS, SQUATTERS, THE WARM MIDWESTERN BEDROOM DOES NOT MATTER, THE DC 5 MEMORIAL FILM, QUICK CONSTANT AND SOLID INSTANT, AN EVENING WITH CHRIS JANGAARD, NUMEN LUMEN and many other films, all distributed through Canyon Cinema in San Francisco. He has served as a juror for The Southwest Alternate Media Project and The National Student Academy Awards, and has received numerous grants and fellowships, including grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, The Royal Film Archive of Belgium, and The Layman Foundation.
Dixon's films and videotapes have been screened at The Museum of Modern Art (New York; 2 shows in 1994), Anthology Cinema Archives (New York, 1993), The Museum of the Moving Image of the British Film Institute (London; 1994), The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York; 2 shows), The Jewish Museum (New York), The San Francisco Cinematheque, The Collective for Living Cinema (New York), The Kitchen Center for Experimental Art (New York), The Nelson-Atkins Museum (Kansas City), The Mary Riepma Ross Film Theatre (Lincoln), The Filmmakers Cinematheque (New York), The New Arts Lab (London), and elsewhere. A complete list of Dixon's publications can be found in the Modern Language Association International Bibilography, available on CD-ROM.
biography | films | distribution | correspondence