Clarke Mackey (born September 30, 1950) is a Canadian filmmaker, author, and educator. He is known for his first feature film, The Only Thing You Know (1972), and for the focus in his filmmaking and writing on vernacular culture. His book on the topic, Random Acts of Culture: Reclaiming Art and Community in the 21st Century, was published in 2010. Mackey is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Film and Media at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, where he taught for thirty years. Early works Mackey began producing short films as a teenager. and three were broadcast on Canadian national television. At age sixteen, he was also credited as one of the producers of David Secter's 1966 film, The Offering. He directed his first feature film, The Only Thing You Know, in mid-1970. Using a documentary shooting style and improvised dialogue, it tells the story of a teenage girl's attempts at independence. Made during a period in Canadian cinema that saw a marked growth in feature filmmaking, in October 1971 the film won two Canadian Film Awards: one to Ann Knox for Performance by a Lead Actress, and a Special Award to Mackey "for outstanding achievement in making his first film." The film was restored and released on DVD, with commentaries and additional material, in 2006. Mackey was one of four cinematographers who worked on Festival Express, a documentary about a rock festival that travelled across Canada in summer 1970. Featuring Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead and The Band, the film was not completed and released until 2003, thirty-three years after the original event. Writer Peter Steven called Mackey's 1977 documentary A Right to Live "one of the key moments in the history of committed documentary in Canada." In the 1980s, Mackey directed several episodes of the Emmy Award-winning TV series Degrassi Junior High. His second theatrical feature, the drama Taking Care (1987), won a Canadian Film and Television Association Award as Best Feature and lead Kate Lynch was nominated for the Best Actress Genie Award in 1988. Target, a project in digital interactive drama that Mackey directed, won a CINDY Award from the Association of Visual Communicators, in Los Angeles, in 1989. Work in vernacular culture In the early 1980s Mackey worked for six years with children in a nursery school. After this experience, Mackey focused much of his personal work on exploring vernacular culture in many forms. Dance