Jonas Mekas was born in 1922 in the farming village of Semeniškiai, Lithuania. He currently lives and works in New York City. In 1944, he and his brother Adolfas were taken by the Nazis to a forced labor camp in Elmshorn, Germany. After the War he studied philosophy at the University of Mainz. At the end of 1949 the UN Refugee Organization brought both brothers to New York City, where they settled down in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Two weeks after his arrival in New York he borrowed money to buy his first Bolex camera and began to record brief moments of his life. He soon got deeply involved in the American Avant-Garde film movement. In 1954, together with his brother, he started Film Culture magazine, which soon became the most important film publication in the US.
In 1958 he began his legendary Movie Journal column in the Village Voice. In 1962 he founded the Film-Makers' Cooperative, and in 1964 the Film-Makers' Cinematheque, which eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives, one of the world's largest and most important repositories of avante-garde cinema, and a screening venue.

" It was sometime in 2007 that Benn Northover asked me if I would like to chose one of Drake's pieces and produce visuals to it for the "Place to Be" Nick Drake project. I chose HORN. As it happened, I had just passed by a beautiful fence covered with luscious red roses, on Meeker Avenue, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn where I lived at that time. With no second thought, I went, I filmed it. And I put the two together. That's it. Perfect".
- Jonas Mekas