Podcasting, Writing, Photography, and Film

Chris Higgins wears glasses and a red-checkered shirt. He grins at someone off-camera.
Photo by Gilbert Tang, Jr.

Hi, I’m Chris Higgins. I’m a podcaster, writer, and documentary filmmaker. You may know me from my documentary series Best of Five: The Classic Tetris Champions, as writer/host of the Election Ride Home Podcast, from my writing for Mental Floss, or my report for This American Life.

I just released the five-episode documentary series Best of Five: The Classic Tetris Champions. This series focuses on competitive Tetris players, and tries to answer the question: What does it mean to be the champion of a game that beats you every time?

In the past few years, I’ve made a bunch of videos for independent artists promoting their work via Kickstarter and Patreon. I also run the camera department for the Classic Tetris World Championship. Want to work on a project together? Use the contact form.

I’ve reported stories for This American Life, The Atlantic, Mental Floss, The Week, Business Insider, The Magazine, Oregon Business Magazine, Aquarium Fish, The Portland Mercury, The Election Ride Home, The Techmeme Ride Home, and probably a lot that I’m forgetting. I run the Jamie Livingston Photo of the Day Instagram account, which posts daily Polaroids from precisely 40 years ago.

Chris Higgins stands behind a video camera, while a man stands in front of a brightly lit white background.
It’s me (right) doing video interviews in a hundred-degree warehouse for Matthew Bogart’s Incredible Doom series. Photo by Matthew Bogart.

In the film world, I’ve written, consulted on, shot for, and appeared in documentaries: Access, Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters, The Lost Arcade, This is Not a Conspiracy Theory, The Adults in the Room, and The Pull. My work was also the basis for the 2019 film Ode to Joy, starring Martin Freeman and Morena Baccarin.

In a past life I developed iPhone and iPad games, including the original versions of Peekaboo Barn and Cocktail Compass. Before that I was a Project Manager working in tech, managing complex web software projects. I also served as Time Travel Consultant for Ransom Riggs, helping him define some of the time-related rules behind the first Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children book.

If you’d like to get email about my projects, please sign up for my email list. It’s very low-volume, generally one post a year.