American filmmaker Tom Kalin was BOTD in 1962. Born in Chicago, he studied painting at the University of Illinois and filmmaking at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Moving to New York in the 1980s, he became a member of AIDS activist collective ACT-UP. He was also a founding member of the artist coalition Gran Fury, using art to protest inaction and misinformation about the AIDS epidemic. He is best known for his 1992 feature film Swoon, a queer-inflected portrait of murderous gay couple Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. Now considered a central text in the New Queer Cinema movement, Kalin’s narrative tapped into contemporary fears about homosexuality and AIDS, though his presentation of two suave gay villains provoked criticism from some activists. He co-produced a number of seminal 1990s gay-themed films, including Rose Troche’s Go Fish and Mary Harron’s Valerie Solanas biopic I Shot Andy Warhol. His 2007 film Savage Grace was based on the true-life case of Barbara Baekeland, an American heiress murdered by her son with whom she was having an affair to “cure” him of his homosexuality. Kalin lives in New York, and teaches film at the European Graduate School in Switzerland.