Ken Jacobs (May 25, 1933 – October 5, 2025) was a prolific and highly influential American
filmmaker. He was one of the last surviving members of the New American Cinema Group which emerged in the early 1960s and reshaped independent and experimental film. Raised in Brooklyn, he encountered experimental cinema through film programs at the Museum of Modern Art. This experience he later described as revelatory.
In the late 1950s, he studied painting with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Then, in 1961, Jacobs met his wife and lifelong collaborator, Flo Jacobs (née Karpf, June 15, 1941 – June 4, 2025). They had two children, Nisi and filmmaker Azazel Jacobs. Jacobs featured Jack Smith in several early films, including Blonde Cobra and Little Stabs at Happiness, before their relationship fractured. In 1964, Ken and Flo Jacobs, along with Jonas Mekas of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, were arrested for exhibiting Smith’s Flaming Creatures.
Among Jacobs’s most important works are Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son and the epic seven-hour Star Spangled to Death. From 1966 to 1969, he and Flo Jacobs were instrumental in founding the Millennium Film Workshop, a key institution for experimental cinema in New York. Beginning in 1969, Jacobs taught at SUNY Binghamton. There he influenced generations of students, including J. Hoberman and Art Spiegelman. In his later decades, Jacobs pursued radical investigations of visual perception and depth through a series of works he called Eternalisms.
