- David Shields was born in Los Angeles in 1956 to a lower-middle class Jewish family. Shields's parents, both journalists, moved the family to San Francisco in 1962, where they were deeply involved in the anti-war and civil-rights movements. In 1978, Shields graduated from Brown University with a Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with Honors in British and American Literature. In 1980, he received a Master of Fine Arts, Honors in Fiction, from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. After starting his career as a fiction writer, publishing three novels between 1984 and 1992, Shields's focus shifted to nonfiction and literary collage. His book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010), noted by David Griffith in Bookslut as a "bible for the next generation of culture-makers," was recently named one of the past decade's 100 most important books by LitHub.
In 2015, Shields co-wrote I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel with Caleb Powell. Shields and Powell co-wrote and co-star in James Franco's adaptation of the book into a film of the same name, which was released in 2017 by Fresh Pond Entertainment. Shields wrote, produced, and directed Lynch: A History, a 2019 documentary about Marshawn Lynch's use of silence, echo, and mimicry as key tools of resistance. Lynch was named by Sight & Sound as one of the five best films at the 2019 International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam and will be streaming this summer and fall on Sundance TV/AMC and First Look Media. Both films are available on a variety of TVOD platforms: Amazon Prime, iTunes/Apple TV, Vudu, Vimeo, Google Play, and Kanopy.- IMDb Mini Biography By: David Shields
- SpousesLaurie Shields(1993 - present) (separated)Laurie Shields(1990 - ?) (separated)
- After I screened the film in Los Angeles last summer, the Oakland rapper Ise Lyfe came up to me and said, "No black kid in Oakland would see Marshawn's refusal to talk to the media as anything other than standing up to the police." And now here we are. I'm thrilled and grateful that the film is now available on SVOD from Topic. I've been a fan of First Look for decades.
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