Sidney Peterson (November 15, 1905 – April 24, 2000), was an American writer, artist, avant-garde filmmaker, and educator.
He attended UC Berkeley, worked as a newspaper reporter in Monterey, and spent time as a practicing painter and sculptor in France in the 1920s and 1930s.
[2] Between 1947 and 1950 the workshop produced five films under Peterson's guidance that were influential on the burgeoning American avant-garde cinema, and significant artifacts of the San Francisco Renaissance.
[3][4] In the years that followed, Peterson worked as a consultant for the Museum of Modern Art, made a series of documentary films, penned a novel (A Fly in the Pigment, 1961) and a memoir (The Dark of the Screen, 1980), and worked at Walt Disney Productions as a scriptwriter and storyboard artist on the never completed sequel to Fantasia.
[7][8] On December 30, 2009, the Library of Congress named Peterson's The Lead Shoes (1949) to the National Film Registry.