Sidney Peterson

Who was Sidney Peterson?

Sidney Peterson was an American author, artist, and avant-garde filmmaker. He attended UC Berkeley, worked as a newspaper reporter in Monterey, and spent time as a practicing painter and sculptor in France in the 1920s and 1930s. After World War II, Peterson founded Workshop 20 at the California School of Fine Arts, 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 and a memoir, and worked at Walt Disney Productions as a scriptwriter and storyboard artist on the never completed sequel to Fantasia.

He died in New York City at the age of 94. Peterson's films are distributed by Canyon Cinema in San Francisco and The Film Makers Cooperative in New York City.

A 2007 comic strip by Dave Kiersh in Syncopated Volume 3 tells of his relationship with Peterson, who was a friend of Kiersh's grandmother.