Kevin B. Lee is a filmmaker, video essayist, and scholar widely credited as a pioneer of both the online video essay and the “desktop documentary” format. He is the Locarno Film Festival Professor for the Future of Cinema and the Audiovisual Arts at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), Lugano, a position he has held since 2022. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, earning Master’s degrees in Film, Video, New Media and Animation and in Visual and Critical Studies. Over the past two decades he has produced nearly 400 video essays exploring film, media, and the digital image. From 2011 to 2016 he served as Founding Editor and Chief Video Essayist at Fandor; he previously worked as Supervising Producer at Roger Ebert Presents At the Movies and edited IndieWire’s Press Play blog. In 2016–17 he was the first residency fellow at the Harun Farocki Institut, Berlin, producing video essays on Farocki’s method of “images studying images.” His desktop documentary Transformers: The Premake (2014), which assembles 355 YouTube videos into a critical investigation of the global film industry, was named one of the best documentaries of 2014 by Sight & Sound. The multi-part Bottled Songs series (2018–21, with Chloé Galibert-Laîné) analyzes ISIS propaganda through video letters, and his feature debut Afterlives (2025) premiered at Doclisboa and the BFI London Film Festival. He previously taught at the Merz Akademie, Stuttgart. Homepage: alsolikelife.com

Selected Filmography
Lee, Kevin B. Transformers: The Premake. Desktop documentary, 2014.
Lee, Kevin B., and Chloé Galibert-Laîné. Bottled Songs 1–4. Desktop documentary series, 2018–21.
Lee, Kevin B. Afterlives. Feature documentary, 2025.