Mark Romanek Movies and Career Information

Mark Romanek (born September 18, 1959) is an American music video director who has also moved into directing theatrical films. Romanek was born in Chicago, Illinois. He credits seeing Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, at the age of nine, and again during its rerelease in 1973, with inspiring him to become a film director. Romanek experimented with Super 8 and 16mm film as a teenager while attending New Trier East, a progressive public high school north of Chicago that offered a four-year film production and theory program. At New Trier, Romanek studied first with Kevin Dole, a local filmmaker who was already creating a form of music video on his own in the mid 1970's; and then with Peter Kingsbury, a filmmaker who had studied with experimentalists Owen Land, John Luther Schofill, and Stan Brakhage at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Both teachers had studied at SAIC and they exposed students to works by significant figures of the American avant-garde cinema such as Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Owen Land, and Paul Sharits. Romanek subsequently attended Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York, and graduated from its Roy H. Park School of