Michael Wadleigh

Michael Wadleigh is an American film director and cinematographer best known for directing Woodstock (1970), the documentary of the 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair that helped define the concert film as a genre. Shot with a small crew of documentary cinematographers using multiple cameras and pioneering split screen editing to capture the scale of the festival, the film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and remains one of the most commercially successful documentaries ever released, drawing wide audiences and shaping how later filmmakers presented live music on screen. Wadleigh, born in Akron, Ohio in 1939, worked as a cinematographer before Woodstock and later directed the horror film Wolfen (1981), based on the novel by Whitley Strieber, and the concert film Jimi Hendrix: Live at Woodstock (1999), drawn from footage shot during the original festival.