From 1982 to 1992 Austin directed the sales and marketing for a small (annual sales $5 million) manufacturer of industrial products.

Drawing on his experiences as a salesman and sales manager, he created a team of half-a-dozen intrepid women and men. He trained them, and managed them. Under his stewardship they delivered record sales, year after year.

Marketing

Austin devised a coördinated national sales and marketing campaign to gain market share from larger and better-capitalized competitors. With innovation, focus, and unrelenting hard work, his team achieved its goals, and his company prospered.

Education

Austin was educated at St. John’s School in Houston, Texas — an institution as celebrated for excellence as it is notorious for austerity and rigor. He dis­tin­guished himself as Editor of the school literary magazine, and as the founder of an independent student newspaper.

Ivy League

He matriculated at Brown, where he completed two concentrations (“majors”), in the Semiotics of Cinema, and in Art.

As a member of the Board of the Film Society (official title — “Minister of Propaganda”), he negotiated with the West German government to import Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Ludwig — Requiem für einen jung­fräu­lichen König for its American première — the first time any film by Syberberg had been shown outside of Europe.

He was graduated a member of the Class of 1982.

At the University of Chicago he participated in a graduate seminar given by Professor Edward Maser on Italian painting of the settecento, to which he contributed research on a sketch by Giuseppe Cades.

Cinema Studies

At Rice Media Center in Houston, Austin mastered the techniques of “direct cinema” — also known as cinéma vérité.

And more than technique: Instructors James Blue and David Hancock promoted direct cinema as an instrument for supporting local community, and for promoting social justice. This is an ideal which Austin embraced enthusiastically, and which has informed all of his subsequent initiatives concerning the cinema.

Believing that a filmmaker must be well-acquainted with the history and æsthetics of the cinema, during his undergraduate years Austin attended screenings of more than three thousand feature films, in theaters and screening rooms in America, Britain, and on the Continent.

Printing and the Graphic Arts

Austin started his apprenticeship early — while in grammar school, he worked every day after school, and all day every summer, in his family’s specialty-printing business, where he mastered the crafts of letterpress and offset lithography.

He learned typography setting metal and wood type by hand on a composing stick, and then on a Linotype; and later, shaping letterforms with electronic tools, and composing pages directly in the PostScript language, and with tools such as PageMaker, Quark Express, and InDesign. His skills as a commercial artist have been proven in the demanding crucible of a commercial print shop.

In the 1980s he directed the firm’s migration to electronic prepress, scrapping Linotype and mech­ani­cal make­ready for computers and automated workflow.

Photography

Austin is an experienced photographer who learned his craft during his work as a commercial artist, when he photographed merchandise for catalogues. His work included studio setups, darkroom processing, and retouching; as well as digital photography, including enhancement with tools such as Photoshop.

Austin’s sculpture series, “Lilith: The Left-Handed Woman” — which incorporated his photographs and sonnets — was exhibited in the legendary 1992 “Personal Stories” show at Houston’s West End Gallery.

From 1999 to 2009, his photographs were published as part of an online commonplace-book, Sprezzatura.