John Kirch was a lifelong filmmaker, Pittsburgher, and teenage zombie in Night of the Living Dead. As a teenager in the mid and late 60s, he created a steady stream of irreverent 8mm films with his friends, each one a glimpse into his passion for collecting underground and pop culture sights and sounds. In his early 20s, he formalized his training behind the camera by attending California Institute of the Arts. When he returned to Pittsburgh, he became a fixture of the city’s burgeoning punk rock and filmmaking scenes, documenting with his 16mm camera and entertaining audiences with his proto-microcinema evenings of 16mm cartoons and camp. John turned his skills as a fastidious film handler into a longtime career as a film editor. Professionally, he cut film and video for local news station KDKA for 35 years. He was also one of the most well-regarded negative conformers in the region. In his final years, up until his death in 2021, John enjoyed the leisure of retirement by completing films from his meticulously organized archive of decades of footage he had shot.