Jim Jarmusch

James Robert Jarmusch was born on January 22, 1953, in Akron, Ohio, to a businessman father and a former film and theater reviewer mother. He grew up immersed in mid-century American pop culture, frequenting matinees at the local cinema. After studying journalism briefly at Northwestern University, he transferred to Columbia University, graduating in 1975 with a degree in English and American literature, and spent a formative year in Paris haunting the Cinematheque Francaise.

Jarmusch enrolled in NYU's Graduate Film School in 1976, where he worked as a teaching assistant to Nicholas Ray. His student feature Permanent Vacation (1980) won the Josef von Sternberg Award at the Mannheim Film Festival. He followed it with Stranger Than Paradise (1984), shot for under $120,000 in stark black-and-white tableaux, which won the Camera d'Or at Cannes and helped define a new American independent cinema.

Across the next four decades he built a body of deadpan, music-soaked features including Down by Law (1986), Mystery Train (1989), Night on Earth (1991), Dead Man (1995), Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), Broken Flowers (2005), Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), Paterson (2016), and the zombie comedy The Dead Don't Die (2019). His Year of the Horse documented Neil Young and Crazy Horse on tour.

A longtime resident of New York's Lower East Side, Jarmusch is also a musician, leading the drone-rock duo SQURL with Carter Logan. He has been with filmmaker Sara Driver since the late 1970s and is known for his swept-back silver hair and a famously soft-spoken demeanor.

The name Jim is a familiar form of James, from the Hebrew Yaakov meaning supplanter. The nickname's casual, unfussy ring has long marked it as a name worn by men who keep working far from corporate centers — fitting for a director who has stayed defiantly outside the studio system.