Parry Teasdale

Parry Teasdale is a video artist, writer, publisher, and early community television pioneer whose work helped define the portable-video movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. As a co-founder of Videofreex, he was part of a collective that used early portable video equipment to document counterculture, politics, local life, and people rarely seen on broadcast television. That work helped imagine television not as something controlled only by networks, but as a tool communities and independent makers could hold in their own hands.

Parry was also involved with Lanesville TV in the Catskills, remembered as one of America's early experiments in local, informal, community-based television. After Videofreex, his work continued to connect media, local voice, and public communication, including service as an advisor to a Federal Communications Commission task force related to Low Power Television. His contribution belongs to the origin generation of community media: the people who tested the equipment, broke the broadcast assumptions, and showed that television could become local, participatory, and alive.