Born in the United States in 1958 and educated in art history and filmmaking (studying under film-analyst David Bordwell and experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage), Jeffrey Babcock departed for Europe in 1984 and never looked back. As a visual and performance artist he traveled to Belgium, Italy, Germany, Russia, Mongolia and Japan. In Holland he performed extensively, including at the Central Museum of Utrecht and the Holland Festival, both leading to wildly spectacular results. During the 1990s he collaborated with filmmaker Ian Kerkhof in creating an eclectic array of transgressive films for Dutch cinemas and national television. Because of the gentrification of movie theaters in Amsterdam, he began to feel we don’t need more cinema (movies) as much as we need more cinemas (non-commercial places to watch them). He therefore helped create a circuit of underground cinemas in over 40 locations since 2005, re-imagining old schools, churches, nuclear war bunkers, bars, graveyards, offices and abandoned banks as cinema spaces. He considers himself a cultural activist, and gives introductions to set films in a biographical, historical, aesthetic or philosophical context. In recent years he has also written and co-written several books on cinema including Screening as an Ideology (2012), Séances (2016), Cinema Ludens (2017) along with a series of self-published pamphlets. He has never taken a selfie, always stayed away from social media as if it were the plague, never had a website, and physically attacks businesses that don’t accept cash.