Eric de Kuyper (1942, Belgium) graduated from the Brussels film school RITCS in 1966. Between 1965 and 1977, he worked as a producer for Belgian television, where he presented De Andere Film, among other programmes. His filmography includes Casta Diva (1982), Naughty Boys (1984), A Strange Love Affair (1985), Pink Ulysses (1990) – all screened at the Venice Film Festival – and most recently: My Life as an Actor (2015). De Kuyper was also cowriter for several films by Chantal Akerman.

De Kuyper also works as a film theorist and essayist. In the seventies, he studied in Paris with, among others, philosopher/semioticist Roland Barthes and linguist/semioticist Algirdas Greimas. He founded the Department of Film and Performing Arts at the Catholic University of Nijmegen. Filmic Passions (1984) is a study in which he examines love in Hollywood film.

He made his debut as a literary author in 1988 with the autobiographical Aan zee, followed by a series of books mainly based on his childhood in Brussels and his numerous stays with his family in Ostend.

De Kuyper was deputy director of the Dutch Eye Filmmuseum until 1992. He wrote numerous articles and essays on film, opera, dance and media for many Dutch and French magazines (such as Cinémathèque and Trafic). Together with Emile Poppe, he published the film magazine Versus between 1982 and 1992.

For the Operadagen Rotterdam he directed silent films to accompany works by Schumann (Genoveva, 2010), Debussy (L’enfant prodigue, 2010) and Berlioz (Les nuits d'eté, 2011). For the CINEMATEK in Brussels, he set up projects around early silent films (The Imagination in Context) and collaborated with the Dutch Opera and conductor Hartmut Haenchen for the accompaniment of Die Stahlwerke bei Poldihütte. He also put together a programme for Bozar around Eric Satie, John Cage, James Ensor and early silent films.