Patrick Dillon(I)

Patrick Dillon is a born and bred New Yorker who makes movies, writes books, and builds large and small format collage out of the human detritus he finds strewn on the streets of Harlem, where he lives, and where he has, for the past fifteen years, taught newborn drug-addicted babies how to suckle. A combat medic during the Vietnam War, Dillon was once a cloistered Catholic monk-in-training, a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand after the war, working with Vietnamese refugees, and was also deeply involved, after he came home, with the invention of the first generation of personal computers and interactive software. He has built and run refugee camps in Somalia (1992-93), with the Irish humanitarian aid group Concern Worldwide), has smuggled film and video equipment into Cuba in violation of the U.S. trade embargo, and has infiltrated and written about domestic, militia-style terrorist organizations. A trained carpenter, set builder, stunt man and demolition rigger for movies, Dillon is also a furniture designer and building restorer. Dillon is an Irish citizen (his people are originally from The Dingle Peninsula) who has lived and worked on several continents. He is currently finishing two films he shot and directed, War Movie, about Iraqi street children who endured the bombing of Baghdad, where he - and they - were trapped during the infamous 'Shock and Awe' aerial assaults of 2003, and Man Made Mayhem, about the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' bombing of the Lower Ninth Ward levees in New Orleans, where he spent seven months in search, rescue, and re-building in the aftermath of the Katrina-Rita hurricanes in 2005-06. Dillon is also developing documentary projects about Michael Jackson, Sean "Diddy" Combs, eugenics and the lie of the AIDS epidemic, garbage, the ethnic cleansing of Harlem, and the actual 'grassy knoll' shooter of President John F. Kennedy - a U.S. government-trained assassin (Laos, 1959) and Chicago mob hit man hired by rogue CIA black ops bureaucrat David Atlee Phillips, and whose videotaped jailhouse confession Dillon is using as the basis for his film, Killing The Kennedys.

Dillon's original screenplay, Somewhere in the City (1998), a comedy about loneliness, was produced and directed, to glowing reviews in 1998, by Iranian auteur Ramin Niami, and starred China's Bai Ling, Peter Stormere, and American comedienne Sandra Bernard. Dillon's other original screenplays range in subject matter from Agent Orange, to police corruption, to the Irish Potato famine, to Bobby Sands and the IRA hunger strikers, to ecological crises, to serial killers. His novels include Ulysses In Tenseltown - about Hollywood and war, propaganda and artistic freedom, and The Terror - set in America in the near future where an Orwellian police state has gained power - and focused on an extremely dangerous homegrown guerrilla operative and his and his young comrades' attempt to overthrow the government. His most recent non-fiction writing (Fall, 2005) appeared in the anthology Another Day In Paradise, co-written with other humanitarian aid workers, about his 10 year-old bodyguard - a boy named Muhammed Ali

• who died during the Somali famine of 1992-93. The book has been

translated into several languages, and is available at bookstores, edited by Carol Bergman and published by Orbis/Maryknoll Press.