Terry Tanner Clark

Terry Tanner Clark is a video artist as well as a film and television writer and editor. She has a Master’s degree in Theater Arts from Hunter College in New York and began her career in the entertainment industry as a writer of animated spots for the PBS series Sesame Street, followed by a stint at Wolper Productions in Los Angeles, where she served as assistant to the producer of the network series The Underwater World of Jacques Cousteau and associate producer on a network special that traced the career of producer David O. Selznick. She subsequently worked with Metromedia Producers Corporation in New York as assistant producer on a TV adaptation of Ben Hecht’s The Front Page and with Alan Landsburg Productions in LA as writer of a Warner Brothers TV retrospective on the Woodstock Festival. Clark’s additional credits as a writer include six episodes of the TBS series The Secret World – an exploration of the role of myth in modern life – plus four episodes of the Discovery Channel series Hunters – a profile of the private lives of predators.  In addition she wrote several episodes of the Discovery Channel’s Secrets of the Deep, a series that examined the mysteries of the maritime world.  Among her additional writing credits are the three-part series Animal Life, a series that explored the principles of taxonomy, evolution, and adaptation, plus the five-part series The Wild World, the latter the recipient of first place awards at the New York and Houston television festivals. For her work in non-fiction television Clark has received several Cine Golden Eagle Awards. She also received awards from the International Wildlife Film Festival as writer and editor of the high-definition PBS Nature special Jaguar: Year of the Cat, one of the most-watched PBS programs of the past decade.  She recently edited the two-hour PBS high-definition special Sahara and wrote the screenplay for Across the Sands, a 3D large format film that chronicles the journey of an Arab boy across the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Desert. Clark has edited a half-dozen films and has worked as cinematographer on several TV and film productions, including Sahara.  She authored the feature screenplay California Blues and is currently writing The Altered States of America, an examination of alternative lifestyles in the United States. She is married to producer-writer Barry Clark and lives in Beverly Hills, California, where she is partnered with her husband in Telenova Productions.  She is a member of the Non-Fiction Steering Committee of the Writers Guild of America and founding chair of the Non-Fiction Exchange, an informal association of LA-based non-fiction film and TV professionals.

Clark’s work in video art began in 1980 with the experimental films Sanctuary, Double Concerto, and Clark 81, which were shot and edited in Super 8mm. With the introduction of the mini-DV format in 1997 she began shooting video pieces with the Sony VX1000 camcorder, editing her works on a Media 100 non-linear editing system. Since 2004 she has used Canon GL-2 and Panasonic HPX-370 camcorders for image capture, editing on Final Cut Pro-HD and upconverting the finished works to high-definition resolution. Several of her recent pieces, for single-channel flat-panel displays, are in private collections in Jackson Hole, Halifax, and San Francisco.