After graduating from
Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, with a
BA (Hons) degree, Mike Dibb joined
BBC TV in 1963. He worked as an Assistant Film Editor/Film Editor in the BBC Film Department until 1967, and then joined the Music and Arts Department. Between 1967 and 1971, he directed numerous films on a range of subjects for various BBC series, including
The Movies,
Moviemakers at the NFT,
Canvas,
The Craftsmen,
New Release,
Omnibus. In 1972, he produced a four-part series of 30-minute films called
Ways of Seeing, now regarded not only as "a landmark work of British arts broadcasting, but as a key moment in the democratisation of art education".
Ways of Seeing won a
BAFTA Award for Best Specialised Series, and was the basis of a bestselling book designed by
Richard Hollis, jointly published by the BBC and
Penguin Books in 1972. In 1976, Dibb made a film based on
Beyond a Boundary, the classic book by
C. L. R. James, and on 23 February 1979 the BBC broadcast his film based on the 1973 book
The Country and the City by
Raymond Williams. In 1983, Dibb left the staff of the BBC to work independently. He joined Third Eye Productions, a company formed by several other former members of the BBC Music and Arts department, including
Barrie Gavin,
Peter West and Geoff Haydon. After 1986, Dibb began to make many of his films through his own company, Dibb Directions Ltd (DD). The many notable documentaries he has made include
The Spirit of Lorca, about poet
Federico García Lorca (in collaboration with Lorca's biographer
Ian Gibson, 1986; Gold Award NY Festival of Film and TV), and
What’s Cuba Playing At? (on the
Afro-Spanish roots of Cuban music;
BBC Arena, 1985),
Tango Maestro – The life and music of Astor Piazzolla (2005, BBC), and
Keith Jarrett – The Art of Improvisation (2005,
Channel 4). With
Stephen Frears, in 1994 Dibb co-directed
Typically British, a
BFI/Channel 4 documentary on the history of
British cinema. In November 2011, Dibb participated in a Masterclass in conversation with
David A. Bailey as part of the International Curators Forum two-day intervention at the
Arnolfini in
Bristol. His two-hour film
The Miles Davis Story (DD and
Channel 4 Television) won the
Royal Philharmonic Society TV award and an
International Emmy award for arts documentary of the year 2001. In 2011, Dibb made the film
Barbara Thompson: Playing Against Time, a 75-minute "musical-medico" documentary "about
Parkinson's disease seen through the prism of music", chronicling the celebrated saxophonist's fight to keep performing despite having developed the condition. The film was first transmitted on
BBC Four on 19 February 2012. Dibb's first book,
Spellwell (2010, Muswell Press), written in
rhyming couplets and illustrated by
Roddy Maude-Roxby, was a playful guide to the idiosyncrasies of
English-language spelling. A major online retrospective of Dibb's work
A Listening Eye was curated by Matthew Harle and Colm McAuliffe for the
Whitechapel Gallery in East London, running from January till March 2021. ==Select filmography==