Photo by Ebru Yildiz
Gary Hustwit is a filmmaker and visual artist based in New York. He has produced over 20 documentaries and film projects, including the award-winning I Am Trying To Break Your Heart about the band Wilco; Oddsac, an experimental feature film by the band Animal Collective; and Mavis!, the HBO documentary about gospel/soul music legend Mavis Staples. Gary worked with punk label SST Records in the late-1980s, releasing the music of bands like Black Flag, Sonic Youth, and Dinosaur Jr. He ran the independent book publishing house Incommunicado Press during the 1990s, and started the DVD label Plexifilm in 2001. With Plexifilm, Gary released over 40 films theatrically and on home video, including work by the Maysles brothers, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Andy Warhol and David Byrne.
In 2007 he made his directorial debut with Helvetica, the world’s first feature-length documentary about graphic design and typography. He has continued to explore how design affects our daily lives with his subsequent films Objectified (2009), Urbanized (2011), Workplace (2016), and Rams (2018). The films have been broadcast on PBS, BBC, HBO, Netflix and outlets in 20 countries, and have been screened in over 300 cities worldwide. His most recent project is Eno, a documentary about musician and artist Brian Eno, which uses generative technology in its creation and exhibition. Eno premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.
Gary’s films have premiered at Sundance, the South by Southwest Film Festival, and the Toronto International Film Festival, among others. He was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Helvetica, and has served on the grand juries of the Sundance Film Festival, the IFP Gotham Awards, and the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. Gary was named one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company. He is a member of the Documentary Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
His film and photographic work has been featured in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art New York, Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, Design Museum London, the Venice Biennale, Paul Kasmin Gallery New York, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Storefront for Art and Architecture New York, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea, and the Colette Gallery in Paris, among others.
He’s obsessed with guitars and is a design collaborator at the electric guitar company Koll. Gary is also part of The Olympic City, a slow-photojournalism project which looks at the afterlife of former Olympic host cities.
Instagram / Twitter / Facebook
Filmography
2002 I Am Trying To Break Your Heart (Executive Producer)
2003 Ted Leo & the Pharmacists: Dirty Old Town (Executive Producer)
2004 Moog (Executive Producer)
2005 Drive Well, Sleep Carefully: On the Road with Death Cab for Cutie (Producer)
2006 Spend an Evening with Saddle Creek (Executive Producer)
2007 Helvetica (Director, Producer)
2009 Objectified (Director, Producer)
2010 Animal Collective’s Oddsac (Producer)
2011 Urbanized (Director, Producer)
2012 The Landfill (short) (Co-director)
2015 Mavis! (Executive Producer)
2016 Workplace (Director, Producer)
2017 This Is What the Future Looked Like (VR piece, Co-director)
2017 Palinopsia (What’s Up with Eagle and Serpent?) (VR, Co-director)
2018 Design Canada (Executive Producer)
2018 Rams (Director, Producer)
2019 Jubilee (Music Video, Director, Producer)
2020 The Map (short documentary, Director, Co-producer)
2022 Skate Dreams (Executive Producer)
2024 Eno (Director, Producer)
“Cities and urban planning, typography and toothbrushes – American documentary filmmaker Gary Hustwit is known for turning his enquiring lens on the things we take for granted and showing them in a new light, gaining him a cult following among the global design community.” – Wallpaper
“More than perhaps anyone, documentary filmmaker Gary Hustwit has articulated the supreme importance of design in our world.” – Fast Company
“The king of design documentaries... Hustwit’s 2007 breakout hit, Helvetica, all but launched the genre.” – Wall Street Journal
“Helvetica was Gary Hustwit's blockbuster documentary about, yes, a font. Hustwit's subsequent films Objectified and Urbanized spurred a resurgence of interest in design storytelling; ‘design’ is a Thing We Talk About Now.” – Wired