Gerd Stern is a poet and multimedia artist with experience in both film and video. He emigrated to the United States as a refugee from Hitler in 1936 and later studied at the City College of New York and briefly at Black Mountain College. During the 1950s he befriended Beat poets such as Carl Solomon and Allen Ginsberg and was an active participant in the San Francisco art scene. He lived on a barge in Sausalito, worked as manager for Harry Partch and Maya Angelou, and hosted jam sessions with Chet Baker and other jazz musicians. He worked at public radio station KPFA and was a publicity agent and journalist, writing for Playboy and other magazines. Stern’s first show of electronic sculptures and collages was held at Allen Stone Gallery in 1962. In 1963 his one-person exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art featured the multimedia performance “Who R U & What’s Happening,” which was also performed at the University of British Columbia with a lecture by Marshall McLuhan. In addition to cofounding USCO, Stern was president of the public company Intermedia Systems Corporation, and currently serves as president of Intermedia Foundation. He has published several books of poetry, including First Poems and Others, 1952; Afterimage, 1965, a serigraphed selection with drawings by David Weinrib; Conch Tales, 1984; Fragments in 2002; and WhenThen in 2018. An oral history of Stern was published by the University of California, Berkeley, in 2002. Stern has been an artist in residence at DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) in Berlin, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska, and the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice. The Stanford University Library acquired Stern’s papers in 2013.