BILL ZARCHY is a freelance director of photography, writer, and teacher based in San Francisco. He has shot film and video projects in 30 countries and 40 states, including interviews with three former presidents for the Emmy-winning West Wing Documentary Special.
Other credits include the Grammy-winning music video Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em, the feature films Conceiving Ada and Read You Like A Book, the PBS science series Closer to Truth, and countless high-end corporate projects for a wide variety of technology and medical companies, including 70 in the Fortune 500. He has shot live musical performances as diverse as Wagner’s Ring cycle, the Grateful Dead, Weird Al Yankovic, Poncho Sanchez, Phil Lesh and Friends, Train, Buddy Rich, Charlie Pride, Elton John, and the Strictly Bluegrass Festival.
Zarchy’s foray into writing is not new. As a student, he was managing editor of The Dartmouth, America’s oldest college newspaper, and founding editor of The Dartmouth Course Guide, an innovative class review with a lasting impact. He served as a campus stringer for Time magazine, won a Newspaper Fund Internship from The Wall Street Journal, and worked as a summer reporter for The Long Island Press. And he grew up in the house of a prolific writer. His father, Harry Zarchy, authored more than 30 books on crafts, hobbies, and the outdoors.
Bill’s tales from the road, technical articles, and personal essays have appeared in American Cinematographer, Emmy, and other trade magazines, Travelers’ Tales and Chicken Soup for the Soul anthologies, the San Francisco Chronicle and other newspapers and literary publications, as well as on his Roving Camera Blog (billzarchy.com/blog). For a number of years, he has belonged to the San Francisco-based writers’ collective Townsend 11 (townsend11.com) and has contributed stories to each of their first three anthologies: No Fixed Destination, No Set Boundaries, and No Definite Plans, all available now as e-books at Amazon’s Kindle Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook Book Store, and Apple’s iBookstore.
Zarchy has an AB in Government from Dartmouth and an MA in Film from Stanford. He has taught Advanced Cinematography and Lighting to graduate students at San Francisco State University since 2002, as well as lighting workshops and classes at UC Berkeley, De Anza College, and the Art Institute of California-San Francisco.
Showdown at Shinagawa is his first book.
