Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Video, Film, Performance, Music
Website: tommybecker.com
Tommy Becker is a San Francisco-based artist who has worked since 2001 on Tape Number One, an open-ended “never-ending mix tape” that serves as the depository for his experiments in cinema. He studied as an undergraduate at the San Francisco Art Institute before earning an MFA in Film/Video/Performance from California College of the Arts, where he received the All College Honor Award. Alongside his studio practice he taught visual arts at Gateway High School in San Francisco from 2003 to 2023, a two-decade span that later became the subject of his film Elective: ART.
Becker has held residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin (2005), the Wexner Center for the Arts Film/Video Studio in Columbus (2016), Vermont Studio Center (2025), the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Vashon Artist Residency in Washington. In 2022 he was nominated for the SECA Art Award at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and in 2023 he received a jury award for Best Experimental Work at the West Virginia Mountaineer Short Film Festival.
His films circulate widely on the experimental and underground festival circuit, with screenings at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Athens International Film + Video Festival, Kassel Documentary Film & Video Festival, Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, Revelation Perth International Film Festival, and Antimatter in Victoria. Locally he is a fixture at Other Cinema / Artists’ Television Access in the Mission, where he regularly premieres expanded-cinema versions of new work, and he has also shown at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF Cinematheque’s Crossroads, Shapeshifters Cinema in Oakland, and the Roxie Theater. Canyon Cinema distributes a selection of his films.
Becker describes himself as “a poet trapped in a camcorder,” and his art rock films take a frankly collagist approach to their subjects. Each work layers original songwriting and spoken word over performance, handmade costumes and props, archival and found footage, direct-on-16mm marks, glitch artifacts, and in-computer animation and design. The results sit somewhere between video poem and music video: pieces are typically built as suites of vignettes bound together by a melodic soundtrack, with short educational-sounding introductions that lend the whole a wry documentary cast.
The tone is what distinguishes the practice — sentimental yearning set against banal or absurd imagery, pop songs that wrap a subtle menace inside humor. Recurring themes include animal life and liberation, empathy and interconnection, human attachment to machines, and the conditions of teaching and public education. Becker frequently presents the work as expanded cinema, singing and performing live in sync with the projection, and he extends individual films into 2D mixed-media works and QR-coded zines that pair film stills and text with links to the moving-image version.
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