James Francis Cameron (born August 16, 1954) is a Canadian film director, producer and screenwriter. His writing and directing work includes The Terminator and Titanic. To date, his directorial efforts have grossed approximately US$1.1 billion domestically, unadjusted for inflation. After several feature films, Cameron turned his focus to documentary filmmaking and the co-development of the digital 3-D Fusion Camera System. He is currently working on a return to feature filmmaking with the epic science fiction film Avatar, which will make use of the Fusion Camera System technology. Avatar is scheduled for release in December 2009.

Cameron was born in Kapuskasing, Ontario, Canada, the son of Shirley, an artist and nurse, and Phillip Cameron, an electrical engineer. He grew up in Chippawa, Ontario (now part of the city of Niagara Falls) and attended Stamford Collegiate in Niagara Falls, and his family moved to Fullerton, California in 1971. While he studied physics and English at California State University, Fullerton, Cameron used every opportunity to visit the film archive of USC. To the surprise of many people, although Cameron had a large educational background in the natural sciences, he chose a philosophy major from The University of Toronto in 1973. Cameron says of his time there that he was,

"completely self taught in special effects. I'd go down to the USC library and pull any theses that graduate students had written about optical printing, or front screen projection, or dye transfers, anything that related to film technology…if they'd let me photocopy it, I would. If not, I'd make notes."