James K. Lambert, just the facts, ma’am:
- Born and raised in Minnesota.
- MFA in Radio, TV & Film, with a focus on nonfiction filmmaking. University of North Texas, Denton.
- BA in Film Studies and American Studies. University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
- Former Program Chair at the Minneapolis Media Institute.
- More than a dozen years of experience teaching about film, mass media, and history.
- Best known for the feature documentary, Conspiracy Theorists Lie (2015), and the History Think Blog.
Listen Up and I’ll Tell You a Story
I came of age in the 1970s, the son of two musicians, raised in Minnesota, and after some traveling around, I settled back in the Land of 10,000 Lakes (11,842, actually, but who’s counting?).
I am a husband, father, documentarian, writer, and teacher, if you’re into the whole label thing.
Like most people worth listening to, I’ve been shaped by unexpected experiences. Here’s a really crazy one:
Back in the early ’90s, I worked for a pharmacist-turned-entrepreneur, Mark Foster, at his CD-ROM company, Quanta Press. (If you don’t know what CD-ROMs are, look it up.) When the business collapsed and the debts piled up, Foster arranged for two men to take him out to a field and shoot him, staging his suicide as if it were a murder. He got the escape he wanted, but the police saw through it. His accomplices went to jail for manslaughter, and none of his family got any of the insurance money. Not exactly a typical business learning curve, but the kind of introduction that shapes a person’s view of others, their motives, and the truth in all its gray areas.
My documentaries and writing tackle history and the human condition from perspectives people don’t always consider. I don’t fit into anyone’s neat little box—political, philosophical, theological—I’m more of a “plague on both your houses” kind of guy.
One of my main concerns is the rise of disinformation and conspiracy theories. My film Conspiracy Theorists Lie (2015) has earned me detractors among those invested in distortion, but that only fuels me to keep going.
Previously, I published a short story collection, Things That Go Bump in the Night, and I am currently finishing a nonfiction book about the nature of reality, It’s All Code: Are We Living in a Virtual Reality? I also write for my History Think Blog. The old adage is probably true, history will teach us nothing, but I keep trying to push back against it.
If you’d like to stay up to date on my work, join my newsletter, And Now For Something Completely Different. I keep each update short and to the point, with just a little rambling. You can also find an archive of past issues on this site.
