Dubbed by Robert Koehler as ‘[o]ne of the most adventurous American filmmakers’ (Variety 12/11/11), director Bill Morrison was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1965 and he currently lives in New York. He attended Cooper Union, where he studied painting and animation. After college, he worked with New York's Ridge Theater, making short film backdrops for their avant-garde productions. This work has been recognized with two Bessie awards and an Obie Award.

Morrison's film and multimedia art has been screened at festivals, museums, and concert halls worldwide, including the Sundance Film Festival and the Tate Modern. The Museum of Modern Art has acquired eight of his titles for their permanent collection. The MoMa also hosted a mid-career retrospective of Morrison's work in October-November 2014.

His films are found in the collection of the Walker Art Center and the EYE Film Institute. Morrison has been commissioned to create films for numerous composers, including John Adams, Laurie Anderson, Gavin Bryars, Dave Douglas, Richard Einhorn, Bill Frisell, Michael Gordon, Henryk Gorecki, Vijay Iyer, Jóhann Jóhannsson, David Lang, Harry Partch, Steve Reich, and Julia Wolfe. Morrison has received the Alpert Award, as well as fellowships from Creative Capital, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the NEA.

Decasia (2002), his feature-length collaboration with composer Michael Gordon, was described by The Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman as ‘the most widely praised American avant-garde film of the fin-de-siècle ’ (Hoberman 2007) and by Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris as maybe ‘the greatest movie ever made’ (quoted in Weschler 2002). It was also was selected to the US Library of Congress’ 2013 National Film Registry, becoming the most modern film named to the list that preserves works of great cultural, historic or aesthetic significance to the nation's cinematic heritage. Writing in The New York Times Magazine, Lawrence Weschler wrote that watching the film, ‘I found myself completely absorbed, transfixed, a pillow of air lodged in my stilled, open mouth.’

In 2013, Morrison was honored with retrospective programs in four different countries: the Walker Art Museum, United States; the Vila Do Conde Short Film Festival, Portugal; the Adelaide Film Festival, Australia; and the Aarhus Film Festival, Denmark.