Paul Sharits was born in 1943 in Denver, Colorado and died in 1993, in Buffalo, New York. By his late 20s he had established himself as a visual artist, most widely acknowledged for his work in highly experimental and avant-garde film. In the latter half of the 1960s, he took a teaching post at the Center for Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he interacted with artists such as Hollis Frampton and Tony Conrad. Prior to his death in 1993, he built a substantial body of film work in the structural film movement.