David Schickele

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David Schickele (March 20, 1937 – October 31, 1999) was an American musician, film director, and actor. He was born in Ames, Iowa, to Alsatian immigrant parents; his father Rainer was the son of writer René Schickele, and his brother Peter Schickele is a musician and parodist. He grew up in Fargo, North Dakota, and Washington, DC, and studied English at Swarthmore College, graduating in 1958. From 1958 to 1961 he played as a freelance violist at Radio City Music Hall in New York and toured with the Robert Shaw Chorale. In 1961 he joined the Peace Corps and taught English at the University of Nigeria Nsukka until 1963. He wrote an essay about his Peace Corps experience and later made Give Me a Riddle (1966), his first major Peace Corps–related film. His 1971 film Bushman won Best First Feature at the Chicago International Film Festival and was restored and released in 2024; it is kept by the Pacific Film Archive at UC Berkeley and by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His last film, Tuscarora, appeared in 1992. Schickele also contributed music to Northern Lights (1978) and acted in his own films Signal Seven and Heat and Sunlight, as well as seven Bobby Roth films, including Dead Solid Perfect (1988) and Naomi & Wynonna: Love Can Build a Bridge (1995). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979. He died in San Francisco at the age of 62.