Michael Chanan is a seasoned documentary film-maker, author of books on both film and music, and Professor of Film & Video at Roehampton University, London.
He began his professional life as a music critic, making his debut as a documentarist with a couple of films on contemporary music for BBC2 in the early 1970s. In the 80s, after a stint teaching film at the then Polytechnic of Central London, he directed a number of films on Latin American subjects, mainly for Channel Four.
He returned to teaching in the 90s in the Media School of the then London College of Printing. In 2000, he was Visiting Professor in the Literature Programme at Duke University, USA, and then joined the School of Cultural Studies at the University of the West of England where he became Professor of Cultural Studies in 2002, before moving to Roehampton University in 2007.
His most recent book is The Politics of Documentary (2007), and his latest film, following a stint as the first video blogger for the New Statesman, is Chronicle of Protest, a video diary about the anti-cuts movement in the UK. He publishes written commentaries and video blogs as Putney Debater. A collection of his writings on Latin America cinema and other topics can be found at www.mchanan.com.

"...a unique and important resource... [with] an enormous amount of information... an admirable, complex effort."--Library Journal

"...informative, thorough, and well-paced... Highly recommended for appropriate college classes, and for university libraries building collections on the history of cinema."-- Choice (American Library Association)