HimmelrichPR · CC BY-SA 2.0

Alex Ross Perry made his first feature, Impolex, on a $15,000 budget shot on 16mm, before Listen Up Philip (2014) and Her Smell (2018) established him as one of American independent film's more literary directors, drawing visibly on Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon. His earlier film The Color Wheel was named the best undistributed film of 2011 by Indiewire and the Village Voice. He has built a long-running collaboration with cinematographer Sean Price Williams, and in 2024 released Pavements, a documentary-fiction hybrid built around a jukebox musical he staged himself.