Ohio State University, Columbus

In 1976, Skip Norman began studying for a BA in the Liberal Arts at the College of Arts and Sciences, the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. He went on to pursue an MA and finally an interdisciplinary PhD in Visual Anthropology. In a letter of August 1982 to Carlos Bustamante, Norman writes: “It is ever more strange, to me, that I have been able to negotiate the educational system here (BA, MA, and eventually, a Ph.D. [summer 83]) without spending a penny of my own money, and with little intellectual—emotional—artistic difficulty.” In his 2017 essay “Why I Did Not Become a Film Critic,” filmmaker Thom Andersen recalls that for a short period in the late 1970s, the Department of Photography and Cinema, headed by Ron Green, was a thriving and experimenting institution that hired Klaus Wyborny, Noël Burch, and Allan Sekula as professors (see Wyborny’s recollections here). So far, we know very little about Skip Norman’s connections with the cinema department.

References

Skip Norman: Letter to Carlos Bustamante, August 1982, private collection.

Thom Andersen, “Introduction: Why I did Not Become a Film Critic,” in Mark Webber, ed., Slow Writing: Thom Andersen on Cinema, London, 2017, pp. 16–17.