Upon graduation from high school he attended the State University of Iowa, where he studied with the painter Philip Guston.
Worth remained in New York City on inactive duty with the Navy until 1946, when he received an honorable discharge from the service.
In 1956 Worth was awarded a one-year Fulbright Lecturership as visiting professor of documentary film and photography at the University of Helsinki in Finland.
In 1966 he received a National Science Foundation grant for a study with Navajo Indians through which he expanded his ideas about bio-documentary film, a concept that he had pioneered as early as 1964 in a paper at a meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology.
From 1968 to 1972 Worth also held a Visiting Research Professorship at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, where he worked with the Department of Community Medicine to develop a bio-documentary teaching unit to enable doctors, medical students, patients, and members of the community to present themselves and their world on film.
In 1972, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Worth organized and taught (together with Jay Ruby, Carroll Williams, and Karl Heider) a summer institute which took selected doctoral students and young faculty in the social sciences and helped them to learn how to use the visual media of still photography, motion pictures, and television for research and communication.
He was chair of the Research Division of the University Film Association, and served as the senior member of the board of directors for the Society of Cinematologists from 1967 through 1970.
Worth was attending the Flaherty Film Seminar in Andover, Massachusetts, when he died peacefully in his sleep of a heart attack on August 29, 1977, at the age of fifty-five.