Biography
Bill Streeter has spent more than 20 years documenting the music, culture, and architecture of St. Louis.
A documentary filmmaker and cinematographer, he created Lo-Fi Saint Louis, one of the longest-running channels on YouTube, and the Lo-Fi Cherokee music festival, and he directed the Nine PBS documentary Brick by Chance and Fortune.
Trained at Columbia College Chicago, Streeter spent 12 years working in Chicago before moving to St. Louis. An outsider's eye for the city has driven his work ever since. In he launched Lo-Fi Saint Louis to document the city's independent music scene. Its first YouTube upload came in August , just four months after the first video ever posted to the platform, and the channel has published consistently ever since.
Lo-Fi's one-take performance videos often gave artists their first serious video exposure. The series captured Carolina Chocolate Drops before their Grammy win and Madisen Ward and the Mama Bear before their national television debut on Late Show with David Letterman. Streeter was an early champion of Pokey LaFarge, filming his first Lo-Fi sessions and shooting many of his early promotional photos, work that helped introduce LaFarge to audiences far beyond St. Louis. Across more than 20 years, the series has grown into an archive of hundreds of performances, from emerging acts to Son Volt and The Bottle Rockets.
In he turned that approach into Lo-Fi Cherokee, a one-day festival where bands played in shops, bars, and storefronts along Cherokee Street, each performance filmed as a music video. The festival was held 11 times between and and became one of the neighborhood's signature annual events.
His documentary Brick by Chance and Fortune: A Saint Louis Story () traced how the city's red brick shaped its identity. It screened at the St. Louis International Film Festival, was broadcast on Nine PBS, and is streaming on Prime Video.
In Streeter founded Hydraulic Pictures, a production company making documentary and mission films and fast-turnaround event video for brands and organizations. He has served as the official photographer and videographer for every one of Cara Spencer's campaigns, from her first run for the St. Louis Board of Aldermen through her election as mayor. His camera work has also appeared on the BBC, MTV, and NowThis, including coverage of the Ferguson protests for the BBC and the Stockley verdict protests for NowThis. He shoots and color-grades his own work, and today he continues his documentary essays on Lo-Fi Saint Louis, now in its third decade on YouTube.