Mark Pellington

Mark Pellington is also known as the "Godfather of Music Videos" featuring a lot of the MTV hey-day from the '90's, including ?Jeremy? by Pearl Jam.


Mark Pellington is a filmmaker based in Los Angeles. A native of Baltimore, MD, he attended the University of Virginia, receiving a B.A. in Rhetoric in 1984. Upon graduation, he joined MTV's award-winning On-Air Promotions Department, where he developed a series of short conceptual spots, editing original footage with found sound and images. This groundbreaking training in post-production collage and unusual sound/image/text juxtaposition became a primary focus of Pellington's early work.


While at MTV, he branched out as a freelance music video director completing clips for Information Society, Malcolm McLaren, and De La Soul, among others. He also ventured into the art world, collaborating on text image pieces with New York gallery artist Jenny Holzer and William Burroughs.


In 1988, Pellington developed an idea for a non-linear collage program. Created in partnership with MTV Europe producer/director Jon Klein, Buzz was an ambitious 13-part global series commissioned by MTV and channel 4 (UK). Hailed by critics as progressive adventurous television, it was the culmination of Pellington's MTV career.


Upon completing Buzz, Mark refined his unique personal vision through a series of TV and video projects. He is internationally recognized as one of the world's Premiere music video directors. His video for Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" is one of the most popular in history, as well as one of the most honored. It earned him Best Director at the 1992 Billboard Video Music Awards, and picked up four 1993 MTV Video Music Awards, including Best Director and Video of the Year.


His Videos for such noted rock, pop, and rap performers as U2, PM Dawn, Public Enemy and Alice in Chains form a prolific and often imitated body of work. A piece for INXS, entitled "Beautiful Girl," is a provocative visual essay on the female body that garnered a Grammy nomination. With his video for the Jungle Brothers' "I Get A Kick Out Of You," Pellington joined Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, and Jonathan Demme as one of the elite group of directors chosen for Red, Hot & Blue, a landmark AIDS special shown on ABC and later released on home video.


Mark brought his commentary on television and media manipulation techniques to large stadiums around the world when he helped create the multi-screen image environment for U2's highly acclaimed "Zoo TV" tour.


He also served as creative director on an experimental multi-media project for the Spanish exhibition at World Expo ?92 in Seville, Spain. "The Memory Palace" was a five-screen live-action/film evocation of cyberspace made in collaboration with science fiction writer William Gibson, Spanish performance group La Fura Dels Baus, Buzz director Mark Neale, artist Julia Heyward, and musicians Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel.


Outside of the music world, Pellington developed his eye for documentary and narrative. Words In Your Face, a half-hour film he created for PBS's prestigious series Alive From Off Center, anticipated the current appeal of spoken word poetry. A half-hour television poem, Words featured John Leguizamo, KRS-ONE and Henry Rollins, and was chosen as one of six U.S. entries at the 1992 Input Festival.


Pellington wrapped up Red Hot & Dance and collaborated with Obie-award winning director David Gordon and music producer Hal Willner on a half-hour live action cartoon called "Punch and Judy Get Divorced" for the PBS series Alive TV.


In 1993 he created his most personal work to date, a 30-minute film for PBS, called Father's Daze, in which he came to terms with his father's suffering from Alzheimer's disease. This intense, impressionistic diary film was screened at the Berlin, Montreal and Rotterdam Film Festivals and was praised by critics worldwide.


The United States of Poetry was a five-part series for PBS that took a year-and-a-half to complete. In the program, Pellington takes the v