Audie Elizabeth Bock (born October 15, 1946) is an American film scholar and politician who served in the California State Assembly from 1999 to 2000, and was elected to the Sarasota County, Florida Soil and Water Conservation District in 2018. She was elected in 1999 as a Green Party member during a special election for Oakland's 16th Assembly District, but switched to the Democratic Party after losing the 2000 election. Early life and career Bock was born in New York and raised in Berkeley, California. She attended Berkeley High School. She then attended Wellesley College, graduating in 1967. For the next five years, she lived in Japan, near Tokyo, where she taught English and helped to publish English-language travel books. After that, she returned to the United States to attend Harvard University, where she received a master's degree in East Asian studies. She stayed at Harvard to receive a PhD, where she wrote a dissertation on Japanese film directors. This involved returning to Japan and interviewing some directors, including Akira Kurosawa; the two struck up a friendship as a result. Bock's dissertation was published as the 1978 book Japanese Film Directors (). Bock served as an assistant producer on Kurosawa's 1980 film Kagemusha. Academic career Bock translated Akira Kurosawa's partial autobiography, Something Like An Autobiography (), which was published in 1983 by Vintage International. In 1985 she wrote the first book-length study in English of Mikio Naruse, Naruse: A Master of the Japanese Cinema. Bock has taught college classes, as well as teaching throughout Hayward as a K-12 and adult school substitute teacher. She holds a Certificate in Non-Profit Management from the University of San Francisco. In 1994, Bock joined the Green Party. She served as a volunteer on Ralph Nader's 1996 campaign for the presidency. California State Assembly Bock was elected to the Assembly in a 1999 special election after the mid-term resignation of U.S. Congressman Ron Dellums. Dellums' resignation caused a number of special elections that resulted in the ascension of State Senator Barbara Lee to Dellums' congressional seat (she had been Dellums' former chief of staff), and the rise of State Assemblyman Don Perata to Lee's Senate seat. The special election was the last in a series of five special elections in twelve months known as the special election musical chairs. Bock won the 1999 election by a combination of circumstances. Although she received less than 9