John Greyson facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
John Greyson
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Greyson in 2014
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John Greyson
March 13, 1960 Nelson, British Columbia, Canada
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| Nationality | Canadian |
| Occupation | Film director, film producer, screenwriter, video artist |
| Years active | 1984–present |
| Partner(s) | Stephen Andrews |
John Greyson (born March 13, 1960) is a Canadian director, writer, video artist, producer, and political activist, whose work frequently deals with queer characters and themes. He was part of a loosely-affiliated group of filmmakers to emerge in the 1980s from Toronto known as the Toronto New Wave.
Greyson has won accolades and achieved critical success with his films—most notably Zero Patience (1993) and Lilies (1996). His outspoken persona, activism, and public image have also attracted international press and controversy.
Greyson is also a professor at York University's film school, where he teaches film and video theory, film production, and editing.
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Early life
Greyson was born in Nelson, British Columbia, the son of Dorothy F. (née Auterson) and Richard I. Greyson. He was raised in London, Ontario, before moving to Toronto in 1980, where he became a writer for The Body Politic and other local arts and culture magazines, as well as a video and performance artist.
Career
He directed several short films, including The Perils of Pedagogy, Kipling Meets the Cowboy and Moscow Does Not Believe in Queers, before releasing his first feature film, Pissoir, in 1988.
Greyson's next film was The Making of Monsters, a short musical film produced during Greyson's residency at the Canadian Film Centre in 1991. The film deals with the 1985 murder by five adolescent males of Kenneth Zeller, a high school teacher and librarian. The film features Marxist literary critic Georg Lukács as the producer of Monsters, with Bertolt Brecht (played by a catfish) as director. Greyson's film was pulled from distribution when the estate of Kurt Weill objected to its use of the tune of Mack the Knife. Greyson had originally received copyright permission to use the tune, but it was withdrawn, apparently because Weill's estate objected to the film's homosexual themes. Although copyright is no longer an issue, having lapsed in 2000, fifty years after Weill's death, the film has not yet been re-released by the Canadian Film Development Corporation.
Greyson is best known for the feature-length films Zero Patience and Lilies. His other films include Un©ut (1997), The Law of Enclosures (1999), and Proteus (2003). He has also directed for television, including episodes of Queer as Folk, Made in Canada, and Paradise Falls.
In 2003, Greyson and composer David Wall created Fig Trees, a video opera for gallery installation, about the struggles of South African AIDS activist Zackie Achmat. In 2009, a film version of Fig Trees was released. This film, a feature-length documentary opera, premiered at the Berlinale as part of its Panorama section, where it won the Teddy Award for Best Documentary.
In 2007, Greyson was the recipient of the Bell Award in Video Art. The award committee stated: "John Greyson is perhaps best known to a general public as a feature film director. He shoots his 'film' projects on video with trademark video post-production techniques, thus colonizing the space of cinema with the aesthetics of video. An incisive social and political critic, Mr. Greyson is in fact one of the leaders in the AIDS activist video movement, among others. Mr. Greyson has supported the practice in many ways and he influences many emerging artists."
In 2013, Greyson released Murder in Passing, a murder mystery series which aired as 30-second episodes on Pattison Outdoor Advertising's video screens in the Toronto Transit Commission subway system and as a web series.
In 2020, he released the short film Prurient as part of the Greetings from Isolation project. In 2021, his experimental short International Dawn Chorus Day had its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the Teddy Award for best LGBTQ-themed short film.
Personal life
Greyson is openly gay. His partner is Canadian visual artist Stephen Andrews, who he has lived with since the 1990s. They have been referred to as a "power couple" in Canada's art scene. The Art Gallery of Ontario recently installed a retrospective of Andrews' work exploring AIDS, surveillance, war, memory and chaos theory.
Awards
- The University of Toronto's Citizenship Award, for contribution to awareness and education around issues of sexual diversity
Filmography
