Roger Kynard "Roky" Erickson was an American musician and singer-songwriter. He was a founding member and the leader of the 13th Floor Elevators and a pioneer of the psychedelic rock genre.
Louis Black is an American journalist and businessman who is the co-founder of The Austin Chronicle, an alternative weekly newspaper published in Austin, Texas, and was the newspaper's editor from its inception until his retirement on August 8, 2017. He has written over 600 articles in his column in that newspaper. Black is also the co-founder of the South by Southwest Festival, also located in Austin, although the festival operates separately from the Chronicle. He also is a founding partner in Toronto's North by Northeast music and film festival.
The Austin Chronicle is an alternative weekly newspaper published every Thursday in Austin, Texas, United States. The paper is distributed through free news-stands, often at local eateries or coffee houses frequented by its targeted demographic. The newspaper reported a weekly readership of 545,500. It is part of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia and it emulates the typical publications of the 1960s counterculture movement.
KLRU, branded on-air as Austin PBS, is a PBS member television station in Austin, Texas, United States, owned by the Capital of Texas Public Telecommunications Council. In 2022, KLRU moved into its "Austin Media Center" studios located on the Austin Community College Highland Campus, which was redeveloped from the former Highland Mall. KLRU occupies 45,000 square feet (4,181 m2) in what was previously the mall's Dillard's department store. The station's transmitter is located in the West Austin Antenna Farm in unincorporated Travis County. In addition to airing program content from PBS, it produces original programming including the national music series Austin City Limits.
The Driskill, a Romanesque-style building completed in 1886, is the oldest operating hotel in Austin, Texas, United States, and one of the best-known hotels in Texas generally. The Driskill was conceived and built by Col. Jesse Driskill, a cattleman who spent his fortune constructing "the finest hotel south of St. Louis".
South by Southwest, abbreviated as SXSW and colloquially referred to as South By, is an annual conglomeration of parallel film, interactive media, and music festivals and conferences organized jointly that take place in mid-March in Austin, Texas, United States. It began in 1987 and has continued to grow in both scope and size every year. In 2017, the conference lasted for 10 days with the interactive track lasting for five days, music for seven days, and film for nine days. There was no in-person event in 2020 and 2021 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic in Austin, Texas; both years, there was a smaller online event instead.
Paul J. Stekler is a political documentary filmmaker, a professor, and former chair and head of the production program in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin College of Communication. Known for his documentary films about American politics, he was also the on-camera advisor to the cast of The Real World Austin during their attempt to create a documentary about the South by Southwest Music Festival (2005–2006). Among other major filmmaking awards, he has earned two Peabody, three Columbia/duPont, three national Emmy awards, and a Special Jury Award at the Sundance Film Festival.
Edmund Ward was an American writer and radio commentator, the "rock-and-roll historian" for NPR's program Fresh Air from 1987 to 2017 and one of the original founders of Austin's South by Southwest music festival.
Marilyn Buferd was an American film and television actress as well as the winner of both the Miss California and Miss America pageants of 1946. During the latter half of the 1940s and throughout the 1950s, she performed in nearly two dozen American, Italian, and French films, including Touchez pas au grisbi opposite Jean Gabin (1954). Buford also appears in several television series originally broadcast in the 1950s, such as The Millionaire, Highway Patrol, Schlitz Playhouse, The Ford Television Theatre, and Orient Express.
Benjamin Jeffrey Steinbauer is an American director and camera operator, who is best known for directing the feature documentary Winnebago Man (2009). Steinbauer has directed other documentaries, including Chop & Steele (2022), which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, Brute Force (2012) and Heroes From The Storm (2017), as well as episodic television for the PBS show Stories of the Mind and the CBS show Pink Collar Crimes.
Black Joe Lewis is an American blues, funk and soul artist influenced by Howlin' Wolf and James Brown. He formed Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears in Austin, Texas, in 2007. In March 2009, Esquire listed Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears as one of the "Ten Bands Set to Break Out at 2009's SXSW Festival."
Chad Jeremy Holt was an American writer, actor, and performer in Austin, Texas. He was the subject of the independent documentary film Total Badass by director Bob Ray about his struggles with drug use and the criminal justice system.
Robert Byington is an American film director, screenwriter and actor living in Austin, Texas. He is most noted for his films RSO (2008), Harmony and Me (2009), Somebody Up There Likes Me (2012), winner of The Special Jury Prize at the 2012 Locarno Film Festival, 7 Chinese Brothers (2015) starring Jason Schwartzman, Olympia Dukakis and Tunde Adebimpe, and Infinity Baby (2017) starring Kieran Culkin, Nick Offerman, and Martin Starr. His most recent film, Frances Ferguson, premiered at South by Southwest in March 2019.
SaulPaul is an American artist, and most widely known as a rapper from Houston, Texas. He has garnered much attention with his unique talent to "make songs up on the spot," aka freestyle. SaulPaul's music has been considered unique, in comparison to mainstream rappers.
Kyle Henry is an American independent filmmaker, editor, and educator. Henry teaches film production at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, while also spending time in Los Angeles and Austin.
Gabriel Luna is an American actor and producer. He is known for his roles as Robbie Reyes / Ghost Rider on the ABC action superhero series Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Tony Bravo on the El Rey Network drama series Matador, Paco Contreras on the ABC crime drama series Wicked City, Rev-9 in the Terminator film Terminator: Dark Fate (2019), and Tommy in the HBO post-apocalyptic drama series The Last of Us. He has also starred in the films Bernie (2011), Balls Out (2014), Freeheld (2015), Gravy (2015), and Transpecos (2016).
Geoff Marslett is an American film director, writer, producer, animator and actor. His early career started with the animated short Monkey vs. Robot which was distributed internationally by "Spike and Mike's Classic Festival of Animation" on video. and "Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation" in theatres. More recently he directed several successful narrative feature films including MARS as well as producing and acting in the experimental documentary Yakona. He appears onscreen in Josephine Decker's Thou Wast Mild and Lovely which is being released theatrically in 2014. He currently resides in Austin, Texas and splits his time between filmmaking and teaching at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Louis Jay Meyers was an American festival organizer and co-founder of South By Southwest. He was born in Austin, Texas. Meyers was the event’s primary music booker until he sold his share in the event after the 1994 conference, citing stress and health concerns.
Tower is a 2016 American mostly-animated documentary film about the 1966 shootings at the University of Texas at Austin directed and produced by Keith Maitland.
Amazônia Groove is a 2018 Brazilian documentary film about the music of northern Brazil and the Amazon region of South America. Directed and co-written by Bruno Murtinho, the film premiered at the Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival in November 2018. It was released theatrically in Brazil on 6 June 2019.
