Gene Youngblood (b. May 30, 1942) is a theorist of media arts and politics, and a scholar in the history and theory of alternative cinemas. His Expanded Cinema (1970), the first book to consider video as an art form, was influential in establishing the field of media arts. He is also widely known as a pioneering voice in the media democracy movement, and has been teaching, writing and lecturing on media democracy and alternative cinemas for thirty-seven years.

Youngblood has lectured at more than 400 colleges and universities throughout North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia, and his writing is published extensively around the world. He has received research grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the United States of America (U.S.) National Endowment for the Arts, The New Mexico Arts Division, the New Mexico Endowment for the Humanities, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Arts Writing.

He was a journalist for ten years in the 1960s: reporter and film critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner; reporter for KHJ-TV, a Los Angeles television station; arts commentator for KPFK, Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles; and from 1967 to 1970 he was co-editor and columnist for the Los Angeles Free Press, the first and largest of the underground newspapers of that era.

For seventeen years, beginning in 1970, Youngblood was a member of the Faculty of Film and Video at the California Institute of the Arts. He has also taught at the California Institute of Technology, Columbia University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and in the film departments at UCLA and USC. He is currently Professor of Critical Studies in the Department of Moving Image Arts at the College of Santa Fe.