Baldwin was born in Oakland and grew up in the Sacramento area, he attended college at University of California, Santa Barbara and University of California, Davis, and earned an M.A. from San Francisco State University. While there, he studied under Bruce Connor and became increasingly drawn to collage film form. Baldwin’s interest in the re contextualization of “found” imagery led him to various practices of mail art, zines, altered billboards, and other creative initiatives beyond the fringe of the traditional fine-arts curriculum. Baldwin has worked on such films as Spectres of the Spectrum, a sci-fi spoof utilizing early educational kinescopes which criticizes the corporate control of electronic technologies.