Born in Appleton, Wisconsin, this eccentric filmmaker and lover of comic books and blues music held several jobs before making his breakthrough feature: the documentary Crumb in 1994. His previous jobs included musician, shipping clerk, printer and welfare office worker. In fact, Zwigoff traces his film career back to discovering a rare blues recording by an unknown Chicago blues musician in 1978. The experience of the two years spent researching this artist (a highly eccentric Howard Armstrong) became Zwigoff's first film project: a documentary titled _Louie Bluie (1986)_ . Zwigoff's next project, however, became the toast of the festival circuit in 1994. A documentary on the underground comic artist Robert Crumb, "Crumb" won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance as well as citations from the New York and Los Angles Film Critics and the Directors Guild of America and it also became the third highest grossing documentary of all time. However, its (along with another 1994 documentary hopeful Hoop Dreams) failure to win even a nomination in the 1994 Academy Awards' Best Documentary Feature category caused an uproar that resulted in a demand to change the way the Academy voters choose the documentary feature nominees. "Crumb" chronicled Zwigoff's acquaintance of nearly two decades of Robert Crumb's life, career, the underground comic scene as well as Crumb's dysfunctional family. Even though it caused a momentary rift between the documentarian and the comic book artist, it has been reported that they have reconciled and are currently collaborating on a screenplay called "The New Girlfriend".

Even with the enormous success of "Crumb", Zwigoff refused to sell out to Hollywood (his aversion to corporate commercialism is a welknown trademark)and turned down lucrative projects like The Virgin Suicides (it was subsequently made into a film by Sofia Coppola in 2000). Instead he struggled for five years to make a feature film out of Daniel Clowes's underground comic strip "Ghost World". Released in 2001, _Ghost World (2000)_ became the summer art house hit and captured several acting prizes for Thora Birch who played the teenage protagonist, Enid. "Ghost World" also brought acclaim for Zwigoff and his co-screenwriter Daniel Clowes, resulting in festival circuit screenwriting prizes as well as a nomination for best adapted screenplay in the 2002 Academy Awards.


Was offered $10,000 to appear in a commercial campaign using hip filmmakers to endorse The Gap but turned it down, saying "I would find it a bit disingenuous after having spent 5 years of my life making a film railing against the evils of Corporate America.". Was offered the chance to direct Elf (2003), but turned it down. Father was a Jewish farmer who moved the family to Chicago when Terry was five years old.