William Farley hails from Braintree, Massachusetts, on Boston's south shore. Raised in a working-class family, his early life included training as a commercial artist and as a sculptor. He has worked in a variety of professions including: farm worker, doorman, longshoreman, gardener, asst. night club manager, produce clerk, merchant seaman, furniture mover, bill collector, steel rigger, bartender, garbage collector, college professor, meat carver, construction laborer, waiter, factory worker, haberdashery salesman, bug exterminator, and doughnut maker. Drafted by the U.S. Army, Farley worked as an illustrator for an intelligence unit. After receiving an honorable discharge he found himself back at the Pentagon with Norman Mailer and several thousand others trying to make it levitate. Mr. Farley's first film was made in 1970. As a graduate student majoring in sculpture he took a class on the history of film. At the end of the semester he had the choice to either write a paper about the films he saw or make a film. Terrified by the prospect of writing a paper, he made a film. The film was a hit on the film festival circuit and Farley was hooked. When he received his MFA a year and a half later he had more credits in film making then sculpture. His many short films and documentaries have won numerous awards and have been broadcast and screened around the world, including the Berlin, Chicago, Sydney and New York Film Festivals. His first feature film, Citizen : I'm Not Losing My Mind, I'm Giving It Away made on credit cards, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1983. The film is an anarchic look at society as a group of anonymous youths roam the San Francisco cityscape. Featured at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Citizen included, among other West- Coast performance artists, playwright John O'Keefe and Whoopi Goldberg in her first screen performance. Mr. Farley directed his second feature, Of Men and Angels, from a screenplay he co-wrote, starring Theresa Saldana and John Molloy of Dublin's Abbey Theatre. The film tells the story of three strong-willed individuals who struggle for control of their own dreams and each other's. In 1989, Of Men and Angels premiered in the dramatic competition at the Sundance Film Festival. Farley's next film was broke, a meditation on street people and showed in over a dozen film festivals in the United States and Europe. In 1998, the Sundance Film Festival screened Mr. Farley's poignant short film, Sea Space. In the spring of 2001, he co-directed The Old Spaghetti Factory, a documentary about the last bohemian nightclub in San Francisco's North Beach. It was shown on PBS in over one hundred U.S. cities. This film was a collaboration between Mr. Farley and Mal and Sandra Sharpe. For the last 5 years, Mr. Farley has been developing his third feature film script, The 5:10 to Cooperstown, based on his childhood experiences living with a father who drank and inadvertently lit things on fire. He has been working with writer Pam Gray (Walk on the Moon, Music of the Heart). During this time, he has been unable to resist making films. The results have been: Darryl Henriques is in Show Business, the story of a comedian struggling to come to terms with his eccentricities, as he attempts to reach a larger audience without compromising his spontaneity or the integrity of his humor; The Stories, the tale of a man urgently looking for an intimate connection with his dying father, and instead finding an ironic encounter with reality; and Arianna's Journey, the story of an Italian woman who has the gift of healing and her travels in pursuit of her spiritual destiny. Presently, he is filming John O’Keefe's adaptation of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, a sole performance which New York theater critic, Todd Carlstro called “a poetic and dramatic tour de force... a rare joy to witness.” © 2007 William Farley