👋 Hey, I'm Basil.
I tend to make things as my way of participating in the world around me. It started with a heavy metal fanzine I put out in high school. From there, I've made books, films, music, tech, a record label, a zine distro, a film production company, and a lot more.
What I'm doing now
Film + Video
I worked on my first documentary film in 2004, and I've been making films in one form or another ever since. This work has screened at festivals around the world, and I've been lucky to work with some amazing people along the way.
Show
Type
Music + Audio
I've fallen in love with music a million times in my life. My first concert was Donna Summer. My first band was a junior high heavy metal group called Court Jester. I'm always finding another sound that makes me feel connected to the world around me.
Kitchen Dance Party — KRSM 98.9 FMOn Air
A one-hour music history dance party, airing Wednesdays at 1pm on KRSM community radio in Minneapolis. The current series, Roll Back the Rugs, is a 14-episode arc tracing how marginalized communities built their own cultural infrastructure as acts of resistance and survival — from Congo Square in 1724 through Bronx block parties, Chicago's queer punk underground, UK sound system culture, and Berlin's post-Wall warehouse raves. Archives are on the Internet Archive.
You Have A Choice (feat. Aisha Gomez)
A song made from Rep. Aisha Gomez's speech on the Minnesota house floor during the ICE surge of winter 2026. Listen on Bandcamp.
Further Beyond Records
From 1992 to 1994, I ran a punk rock record label in Chicago called Further Beyond Records. My mom came up with the name and my brother taught me basic accounting so I could start my first business, but mostly, I learned from watching Scott at Shakefork Records, who basically mentored me. I released records by Cap'n Jazz, Heel, Trigwater, and Silence, plus two compilations: Picking More Daisies and A Very Punk Christmas.
photo by lonewolf
Bands + Other recordings
I joined my first band in junior high and have played music on and off since. Here's some of it.
Publishing
My first "book" was something I made when I was 5 or 6 years old. The obsession with print grew out of fanzine culture in the late '80s and '90s — my first zine was a heavy metal and punk zine called From The Grave, 1990. Since then: a zine distribution service, several books, a press.
Midwest Villages & Voices Press
I run Midwest Villages & Voices as part of my work with the Meridel Le Sueur Family Circle. The press was founded in the mid-1970s by writer and activist Meridel LeSueur and her daughters. It was built to amplify the voices of working people, women, and those whose stories were too often pushed aside. I joined in 2022 and have published two novels since.
Books & Zines
I love print. I made my first zine at fifteen, and took a printmaking class not long after. I spent most of my twenties in copy and print shops, learning the trade. More zines followed, as a way to tell my own story, or the stories of people around me. Along the way I picked up desktop publishing, then design, and started laying out and publishing various books for myself and my friends. One of those projects was On The Road To Healing, a pro-feminist zine series I ran from 1995 to 2004 and eventually made into an anthology.
Basement Children Zine Distro
BC ran from 1995 to '97 out of a basement apartment in Chicago. We brought in personal and political zines from around the world and distributed them at punk shows and events across the city.
Books I've written, edited, or published
Zapata Is Here!
Meridel LeSueur · 2025
Published for the first time after 60 years, it is a novel about the Mexican Revolution through the eyes of communities fighting for their land. (Publisher)
The Girl
Meridel LeSueur · 2022
LeSueur's most celebrated novel, reissued, about a young woman surviving the Depression in 1930s St. Paul. (Publisher)
On The Road To Healing
Basil Shadid, ed. · 2009
A pro-feminist anthology for men against sexism, originally published as a series of zines that came out from 1995–2004. (Editor)
Screenwriter's Toolkit
Basil Shadid · 2011
101 writing exercises for screenwriters. (Author)
Tools
If I have the ability, I like to build tools that solve problems. The following three examples are things I built or experimented with. There are more, but these give a good range of stuff I like to try out.
VideoIQ · automated video for sales teams
Many companies have more customer story content than they know what to do with. Hours of interview footage that gets cut down to one hero video and then sits on a drive. Meanwhile, salespeople are walking into meetings with generic assets that weren't built for their specific deal. VideoIQ closes that gap. A rep selects the customer problem they're solving for, and the app pulls from an existing clip library, uses an LLM to build a narrative around those clips, and assembles a short, custom video they can leave behind.
Project Polyphonic · synchronized online recording
Early in the pandemic, musicians couldn't be in the same room. Project Polyphonic was a test to see if people could record synchronized music online, in real time, without it falling apart. We never fully solved the latency problem (nobody has), but the experiment taught us more than the tool did. We built it so the live performance had a rhythm that would lead and the other instruments would have something to play along to. The tool would auto-correct the sync and present it to the end user, nearly live. The audience could watch with a short delay, not really knowing the delay existed, and the artists appeared to be playing live. There were issues, of course, and we never got it off the ground, but we built it, and it was fun to play with.
mRelease · iPhone app
When the iPhone was still new-ish, before people were signing everything on their devices, I had this idea to take a talent release for film and put it in an app, giving people the ability to sign it on the phone. We were one of the first signature release apps to the market. I teamed up with an engineer in Seattle who built the app, and eventually handed him the project because he was able to maintain it. It was an interesting experience to get an app into the app store and to build a tool that directly helped the work I was doing on set. The tech advanced pretty quickly. Ours had stock releases and no web presence. Tools that overtook ours had web portals, custom releases, and a lot more features. But, for what it was, it did the job and did it well, and helped me understand how to build tools for film.
Newsletter
I quit social media in 2025 and have created this newsletter as a way to share projects and things coming across my world.
Issues, archives, and signup are all on Beehiiv.
Read the newsletter →About
My film credits span Academy Award-nominated, Emmy-winning, and Audience Award-winning work. Recent projects include Elements of Mutual Aid, a four-part docuseries on mutual aid organizing across North America, and Angels Are Made of Light, James Longley's portrait of a school in Kabul. I'm a member of the Producers Guild of America.
For the past several years I've been working at the intersection of filmmaking and emerging technology, building AI-powered tools for video production, speaking on panels, and thinking seriously about what this moment means for documentary ethics, authorship, and trust in media.
I also host Kitchen Dance Party, a weekly music history dance show on KRSM 98.9 FM. My current series, Roll Back the Rugs, traces how marginalized communities built their own cultural infrastructure as acts of resistance and survival.
I have an MA in Mental Health Counseling, which shapes how I approach story and the people in it. I grew up in the Chicago punk scene and started a record label at 17. Since then, I've traveled the world, sometimes hitch hiking and by freight train, in service of a story.
I live in South Minneapolis.