Michael Glover Smith
Director

Michael Glover Smith wrote and directed the feature films COOL APOCALYPSE (2015), MERCURY IN RETROGRADE (2017), RENDEZVOUS IN CHICAGO (2018), and RELATIVE (2022), all of which won awards at festivals across the U.S. and were the subject of rave reviews. The Chicago Sun-Times’ Richard Roeper wrote that “Smith has a deft touch for creating characters who look and sound like people we know” and Matt Fagerholm at Indie Outlook has called him “one of the Windy City’s finest filmmakers.” His films have screened at the American Cinematheque and Rooftop Cinema Club in Los Angeles, Spectacle Theater and Regal UA Midway in NYC and the Gene Siskel Film Center and Music Box Theater in Chicago. He was a recipient of the Siskel Center’s Star Filmmaker award in 2017 and made Newcity Chicago’s “Film 50” list in 2018 and 2020 for being one of fifty individuals who “shape Chicago’s film scene.” He teaches Directing at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee and DePaul University and is the author of FLICKERING EMPIRE (Columbia University Press, 2015), an acclaimed nonfiction book about film production in Chicago during the silent era.