About the presenters at Orphans 11
Lina Accurso is an independent silent film historian who has been working to set a memorial headstone at the unmarked grave of Mrs. Alice B. Russell Micheaux in 2018.
Brendan Allen manages the Archives for Democracy Now! He attended the School of Visual Arts and received a BA in English Literature and Media Studies from the University of New Mexico. He worked as a video librarian for Black Entertainment Television in 1998 and then moved to the Public Broadcasting Service in Alexandria, Virginia, where he worked as the library media coordinator. In 2006, Brendan earned a Master’s in Library Information Science at Pratt Institute, while working as the Senior Archivist for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in New York City. He has been a member of XFR Collective since 2016.
Rob Anen is a recent NYU MIAP graduate. He is currently the moving image archivist for Old Westbury Gardens as well as assistant archivist to documentarian Judith Helfand. He is the 2016 recipient of the Syracuse Cinephile Society Scholarship and the 2017 Film Noir Foundation’s Nancy Mysel Legacy Grant. His recent publication includes “Community Archiving with the National Black Programming Consortium,” Black Camera (Spring 2017).
Ina Archer was born in Paris, France. She attended the Rhode Island School of Design, received her graduate degree from NYU Cinema Studies before going on to the MIAP MA program. As an artist, her single and multi-channel videos have been shown widely. She is a Media Conservation and Digitization Assistant at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Alia Ayman is a filmmaker, curator at Zawya Cinema in Cairo, and a PhD student in anthropology at NYU.
Becca Bender is an audiovisual archivist who will complete her training at NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program in May 2018. She is currently the project archivist for the historic Leopold Godowsky, Jr. home movie collection. Prior to starting MIAP, she was an archival producer on documentary films, specializing in African American history and culture. Her most recent documentary project, the Emmy-nominated Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise, is a four-hour PBS series that looks at the past 50 years of black American history. Other PBS films include Peabody Award-winning Chisholm 72 – Unbought & Unbossed, Emmy-nominated Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies, and Beyond the Steps: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
Howard Besser is Professor of Cinema Studies and Associate Director of NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation masters degree program, which he founded. His research projects have involved preserving digital public television, dance performance, difficult electronic works, as well as issues around copyright and other matters at the heart of moving image archiving worldwide. Recipient of multiple grants from Mellon, NEH, Getty, and other foundations, his latest grant-funded project is with the Library Freedom Institute, studying electronic privacy protection through public libraries.
Bill Brand is an artist, educator, and film preservationist. His films, videos, and installations have been exhibited worldwide in museums, festivals, and microcinemas. His works on paper are represented by Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre in Paris. His public artwork, Masstransiscope, a mural in a New York subway tunnel that is animated by the movement of passing trains, is in the permanent collection of the MTA Arts and Design. He is professor emeritus of Film and Photography at Hampshire College as well as an adjunct professor teaching film preservation in the NYU MIAP Program since its inception. He is a partner at BB Optics, Inc. offering film and digital post-production and archival preservation services.
Carolina Cappa is an audiovisual archivist and media professor. She works at the Museo del Cine “Pablo Ducrós Hicken,” where she is leading the project Nitrato Argentino (@nitratoargentino in Instagram) with the aim of studying the history of technology through the nitrate film collection preserved there. She was also head of the Cinemateca Boliviana film archive in La Paz, Bolivia, where she took part in the restoration of El Bolillo Fatal, a previously lost 1927 Bolivian film. She co-founded Kinetoscopio Monstruo, a non-profit collective that shared non-traditional Bolivian cinema in original-format screenings with live music. She is professor of Audiovisual Technology at the University of Buenos Aires as well as research consultant at the media archaeology project IDIS (proyectoidis.org). She was born and lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Chen Biqiang (aka Chen Mo) is Senior Research Fellow at the China Film Archive. He specializes in Chinese martial arts movies, Chinese film history, and oral historiography. His publications include On the Films of Zhang Yimou, A History of Chinese Wuxia Pian, and A Century of Snapshots from Chinese Film History.
Ting-Wu Cho is a PhD candidate at the Department of Cinema Studies at NYU. She majored in Radio & Television and English at Chengchi University, Taiwan. She received her Masters in Cinema Studies at NYU in 2012. Her areas of studies include transnational cinemas, theories of globalization and media ethnography, and Chinese-language cinemas.
Susan Courtney is Professor of Film and Media Studies and English at the University of South Carolina. Her work there, and beyond, with the Orphan Film Symposium deeply shapes her most recent book, Split Screen Nation: Moving Images of the American South and West (Oxford, 2017). She has also recently published “Framing the Bomb in the West: The View from Lookout Mountain” in Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex (University of California Press, 2018), edited by Haidee Wasson and Lee Grieveson. A new project, on institutional media histories of race, is tentatively titled Zipcode Media: Audiovisual Archives of Segregation and Its Aftermath.
Liz Czach is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. She was a programmer at the Toronto International Film Festival (1995-2005) and researches and publishes on Canadian film, film festivals, and home movies and amateur film. Her latest project is a book-length study of travel-lecture filmmaking in the postwar era tentatively titled Your Ticket to Adventure! Travel-lecture filmmaking, 1945-1980.
Born in Ankara, Turkey, Nazlı Dinçel immigrated to the United States at age 17. She received an MFA in filmmaking from the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, where she currently resides and is building an artist-run film laboratory. Her works have been exhibited at film festivals around the world and she is the recipient of numerous awards. Recently these include the Marian McMahon Akimbo Award at the 2017 Images Festival in Toronto and Best Experimental Film (Her Silent Seaming) at the 2015 Chicago Underground Film Festival. She is the ninth recipient of the Orphan Film Symposium’s Helen Hill Award.
Sarah Eilers oversees the Historical Audiovisuals (HAV) collection in the History of Medicine Division at the U.S. National Library of Medicine. The collection includes about 10,000 cataloged medical and scientific titles in film, tape, and other formats, and about 4,000 unprocessed titles. Sarah handles donors and accessions, selects material for processing, catalogs and describes holdings, selects and prepares titles for NLM’s Digital Repository, manages Medical Media at NLM, and promotes and provides reference service for the collection. She’s worked as an archivist in the History of Medicine Division since 2005 and as head of HAV since 2015. She has no publications to speak of.
Skip Elsheimer no longer lives in a boarding house filled with over 25,000 16mm educational films. He and his wife got pushed out by all the films and digitizing equipment and had to find another place to live. Skip shows films all over the United States and on Internet under the name “A/V Geeks”. Skip has digitized and made available over 3000 films on YouTube and the Internet Archive. He was a co-founder of the Bastard Film Encounter, a counter symposium to the Orphans Film Symposium. He hosts several Home Movie Days a year. He hopes to travel the United States and host at least one Home Movie Day in every state. Skip has attended every single Orphans that has been held on the East Coast and has worn most of the Orphans T-shirts until they were faded and thread-bare and had to be thrown away.
David Emery is a student in the Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management graduate program at Ryerson University in Toronto. In addition to having an academic background that includes a diploma in Multimedia Design (Durham College, 2001) and a master’s degree in English (University of Toronto, 2008), David has been a professional editor for 10 years. His experience with orphan film collections includes an internship at Visual Studies Workshop, whose audiovisual holdings feature educational programming and home movies from the Rochester, New York area. He is currently researching his master’s thesis on film restoration practices at EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam.
Dino Everett was a teenage projectionist at a Drive-In in the 1970’s before spending most of his life as a touring musician for which the University of Indiana has dubbed him the punk rock archivist. He ultimately got a real job at the UCLA Film & Television Archive and now runs the USC Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive, and teaches on archival topics . He has published and presented articles both on the history and technology of the moving image field, and actively supports both the amateur’s role in the history of film archiving and the safe use of archival originals.
Karen Falk has been The Jim Henson Company’s Director of Archives since 1992 and is the author of Imagination Illustrated: The Jim Henson Journal. She is Vice President/Secretary of The Jim Henson Legacy board and has curated numerous Legacy projects, including the Smithsonian’s touring exhibit Jim Henson’s Fantastic World. Falk is a member of the Museum Advisory Board at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta and consulted on the creation of their Worlds of Puppetry Museum and Labyrinth exhibit. She collaborated on the creation of The Jim Henson Exhibition at Museum of the Moving Image in New York, and has contributed to numerous publications, documentaries, web sites, and video releases relating to the life and work of Jim Henson.
Paula Félix-Didier is Director of the Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken in Buenos Aires. A graduate of the NYU MIAP Program, she currently serves on the Executive Council of the International Federation of Film Archives and is a frequent presenter as festivals and conferences worldwide. A regular participant in Orphan Film Symposium events, she also co-hosted Huérfanos del Cine screenings at the 2016 Festival Internacional de Cine de Mar del Plata.
Allyson Nadia Field is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. A scholar of African American cinema, her work combines archival research with concerns of film form, media theory, and broader cultural questions of representation across periods and practices. She is the author of Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film & the Possibility of Black Modernity (Duke University Press, 2015) and co-editor with Jan-Christopher Horak and Jacqueline Stewart of L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema (University of California Press, 2015). She also served as a co-curator of UCLA Film & Television Archive’s L.A. Rebellion Preservation Project. With Marsha Gordon, she is co-editing Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film (Duke University Press, forthcoming). Her current book project is on African American film historiography, the challenge of evidence, and the “speculative archive.”
Walter Forsberg works in film culture and holds a master’s degree in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation from NYU. From 2014 to 2018 he founded the Media Conservation and Digitization department at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Previously, Walter worked for the New Art Trust and was technical architect of the XFR STN exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York — winner of the 2014 Innovation Award for digital stewardship from the Library of Congress. Currently, he works as a web video consultant for the Smithsonian, and as a member of the Laboratorio Experimental de Cine in Mexico City. His recent writing on the cinema appears in BlackFlash magazine, the forthcoming Duke University Press anthology Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film, and in INCITE Journal of Experimental Media, where he is a contributing editor.
Terri Francis directs the Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University, Bloomington. She guest edited a close-up on Afrosurrealism in film and video for the 2013 fall issue of Black Camera: A International Film Journal. She published her path-breaking study of Jamaican non-theatrical films in “Sounding the Nation: Martin Rennalls and the Jamaica Film Unit, 1951-1961,” Film History (2011). Her book Josephine Baker’s Oppositional Burlesque, a study of how the entertainer used humor to master her precarity, is forthcoming from Indiana University Press.
Rafael de Luna Freire is Associate Professor in the Film and Video Department and the Film and Audiovisual Studies Program at Federal Fluminense University (UFF) in Niterói, Brazil. He has published widely on the history of cinema in Brazil, including the book Cinematographo in Nictheroy, about the history of film exhibition in the city of Niterói. He worked many years at the Film Archive of Rio de Janeiro’s Museum of Modern Art and is a founding member and former director of the Brazilian Association of Audiovisual Preservation. Launched in 2008, his blog Preservação audiovisual <www.preservacaoaudiovisual.blogspot.com.br> was the first website in Portuguese exclusively dedicated to the field. Finally, he coordinated the 2015 restoration of the feature film Antes, o verão (Gerson Tavares, 1968).
John Froats collects 16mm film, vernacular photography, and ephemera associated with these interests. He screens films from his collection for free locally at venues in Beacon, New York, as the entity screen16. Clickiti.com is in development to make this content available to a wider audience. A graduate of Purchase College he has worked at Daniel Wolf, Inc., a fine art photography dealer specializing in 19th-century American western landscape photography, for over 30 years. He is deeply passionate about local youth basketball as a coach and chronicler and plays the sport recreationally whenever he can.
Ethan Gates is the Technician for the NYU MIAP Program in the Department of Cinema Studies and a member of XFR Collective. He maintains his active blog, The Patch Bay, patchbay.tech.
Oliver Gaycken received his BA in English from Princeton University and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He previously has taught at York University (Toronto) and Temple University. His teaching interests include silent-era cinema history, the history of popular science, and the links between scientific and experimental cinema. He has published on the discovery of the ophthalmoscope, the flourishing of the popular science film in France at the turn of the 1910s, the figure of the supercriminal in Louis Feuillade’s serial films, and the surrealist fascination with popular scientific images. His book Devices of Curiosity: Early Cinema and Popular Science, appeared with Oxford University Press in the spring of 2015.
Marsha Gordon is Professor of Film Studies at North Carolina State University. She is the author of Film Is Like a Battleground: Sam Fuller’s War Movies (Oxford U Press, 2017) and Hollywood Ambitions: Celebrity in the Movie Age (Wesleyan U Press, 2008), and co-editor of Learning With the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States (2012). She is the former co-editor of The Moving Image, journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, and has just completed a new co-edited (with Allyson Nadia Field) collection, Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film for Duke University Press. She does a monthly show, “Movies on the Radio,” with North Carolina Museum of Art film curator Laura Boyes and host Frank Stasio on WUNC’s The State of Things.
Michael Grant spends his days digitizing analog media as a fellow at the Standby Program and a preservation adjunct at NYU Libraries. On the side he does props and graphic design for some of the musicals that his amazing wife, Kit, writes. He is a graduate of NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation M.A. program, and has been a member of XFR Collective since 2015.
Charles “Buckey” Grimm is an independent researcher and film historian who has published in the journals Film History (“A Paper Print Pre-history,” 1999; “Carl Louis Gregory: Life through a Lens,” 2001) and The Moving Image (“A History of Early Nitrate Testing and Storage, 1910-1945,” 2001). His current area of research focuses on cinematographers of the silent era. He spoke about Howard Walls, Kemp Niver, and the Library of Congress Paper Print Collection of motion pictures at the 2001 and 2016 Orphan Film Symposium.
Roni Grosz is the manager of the biggest collection of Einstein related material in the world, the Albert Einstein Archives in Jerusalem. He actively searches for additional material to acquire, managing a project to improve the metadata of the Archive’s records.
May Haduong is the Public Access Manager at the Academy Film Archive, where she oversees access to the Archive’s Collection. Prior to serving at the Academy, she was the Project Manager for the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project for LGBT Moving Image Preservation, a collaboration between the UCLA Film & Television Archive and Outfest, which produces the Los Angeles LGBT Film Festival. She currently serves on the Legacy Project Advisory Committee as well as the chair for the Elections Committee for the Association of Moving Image Archivists. See co-curated “The Real Indies: A Close Look at Orphan Films” at the Academy’s Linwood Dunn Theater in Los Angeles in 2013.
Creator of more than 80 film and video pieces, pioneering visual artist and filmmaker Barbara Hammer has a multiple praxis for the past 40 years. Her work was included in the 1985, 1989, and 1993 Whitney Biennials and is included in the permanent collections of the Australian Center for the Moving Image, Museum of Modern Art (New York), Centre Georges Pompidou, and elsewhere. She is the author of Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life (Feminist Press 2009). She has had retrospectives at the Tate Modern, Kunsthall Oslo, Toronto International Film Festival, and this year at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. “Her radical cinema of love is an eccentric and physical answer to the American Dream,” say the Austrian Filmmuseum notes for her 2018 retrospective. “Her films straddling the borders of documentary and avant-garde cinema constitute the most extensive body of work related to lesbian love, relationships and the expressive power of sexuality.” <barbarahammer.com>
Stephen Horne is a leading silent film accompanist. A house pianist at London’s BFI Southbank for thirty years, he has played at all the major UK venues and recorded music for many DVD releases of silent films. Although principally a pianist, he often incorporates other instruments into his performances, sometimes simultaneously. He regularly performs at festivals in Bologna, Pordenone, San Francisco, Telluride, Paris, Cannes, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Shanghai, Istanbul, Berlin and Vienna. He composed ensemble scores for The First Born (1928) and The Manxman (1929) on commission from the London Film Festival. He was house pianist for both the Orphan Film Symposium held at EYE Netherlands Filmmuseum and the screening “Orphans at MoMA: An Amateur Cinema League of Nations” in 2014.
Blanche Joslin is a student in the Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management graduate program at Ryerson University in Toronto.
Sarah Keller is Associate Professor of English and Director of Cinema Studies at University of Massachusetts-Boston. She co-edited Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam University Press, 2012), and her book Maya Deren: Incomplete Control examines the role of unfinished work through Deren’s oeuvre (Columbia University Press, 2014). She is currently at work on a book for Wayne State University Press’s Queer Screens series about experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer entitled Barbara Hammer: Pushing Out of the Frame.
Jeff Lambert is the Executive Director of the National Film Preservation Foundation. From 1999 to 2014, as Assistant Director, he managed the NFPF grants, which now serve 284 cultural institutions. He produced the award-winning DVD set Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film, 1947-1986 and oversaw the expansion of the NFPF’s online film offerings, including an ever-growing online companion to The Field Guide to Sponsored Films. He is the co-founder of Lamfanti Presents, an itinerant screening series based in San Francisco.
Andrew Lampert makes moving images, live performances, and still photos when he is not busy writing, teaching, restoring films and archiving work by others. He recently co-edited the book Manuel DeLanda: ISM ISM (J&L Books) and is co-author of the forthcoming volume Go Deep: How To Be Human in the Art World (Badlands Unlimited).
Marie Lascu is a graduate of NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) M.A. program. She is the Audiovisual Archivist for Crowing Rooster Arts, a non-profit that has spent 20 years documenting the arts and political struggles of Haiti. She has been a member of the Community Archiving Workshop (CAW) committee since 2011, and a member of XFR Collective since 2015. In 2016, she received the Society of American Archivists Spotlight Award.
Dimitrios Latsis is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the School of Image Arts, Ryerson University in Toronto where he teaches in the Film Studies and Film and Photography Preservation and Collection Management programs. He received his PhD in Film Studies from the University of Iowa and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Visual Data Curation at the Internet Archive where he served as film archivist. His work on American visual culture, early cinema and the Digital Humanities has been supported by the Smithsonian Institution, Domitor, and the Mellon and Knight Foundations, among others. He has published and lectured widely in the fields of American Visual Culture, the historiography and theory of cinema, and archival studies. He recently edited a special issue of The Moving Image on Digital Humanities and/in Film Archives. He is currently co-editing an anthology (for I.B. Tauris) on documentaries about the visual arts in the 1950s and 60s, and writing a monograph on the historiography of American cinema during the silent years.
Andrés Levinson is a PhD candidate in History at Universidad de Buenos Aires, with a dissertation “Modern Prints, Entertainment Culture in Buenos Aires during the Belle Époque” (Advisor: David Oubiña). He is also Research Coordinator and Film Curator at Museo del Cine de Buenos Aires and Professor of Argentine History at Universidad de Buenos Aires and of History of Argentine Documentary Films at Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero. He was invited to curate exhibitions related with Cinema at Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, PROA and various film festivals. He has published several papers, articles, book chapters, and film reviews in books and magazines. He is author of the book Cine en el país del viento. Cine mudo en Antártida y Patagonia (2012). He has received scholarships from Fundación TyPA, Fondo Nacional de las Artes and BECAR cultura.
Jeanne Liotta is an artist and filmmaker, who has been an orphanista since 2004 when she presented in Columbia, South Carolina on the Film Collection of Joseph Cornell on behalf of Anthology Film Archives. Among her accomplishments she cherishes the Helen Hill Award bestowed in 2012. Liotta is Associate Professor of Film Studies and Associate Chair of Graduate Studies at CU Boulder, as well as faculty member at the Bard College MFA program. She is represented by Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn, New York.
Michael Loebenstein is the Director of the Austrian Film Museum (Vienna). He has worked as a curator, researcher, and author in the fields of film archiving, history, memory, and digital culture since the late 1990s. He was the founder of the Film Museum’s Research and Education department which he lead from 2004 to 2011, when he left for Australia to lead the National Film and Sound Archive (2011- 2016). Projects and publications include the books Film Curatorship: Archives, Museums, and the Digital Marketplace, edited with Paolo Cherchi Usai, Alexander Horwath, and David Francis (2008) and Gustav Deutsch (2009), edited with Wilbirg Brainin-Donnenberg, as well as the online resource Ephemeral Films: National Socialism in Austria (efilms.ushmm.org). He is Secretary-General of the International Federation of Film Archives and a member of the board of the Wantok Musik Foundation (Melbourne/Port Moresby).
Regina Longo is the associate editor of Film Quarterly and the founding director of the Albanian Cinema Project. She has taught in the School of Film and Media Studies at SUNY Purchase, the Department of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Film and Media Studies department at UC Santa Barbara, from which she received her PhD. She was the lead film archivist at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) from 1999 to 2005. Regina continues to lend her expertise to archives at risk in various parts of the world, encouraging and aiding archivists, historians, and educators in making cold-war era collections accessible to global audiences. In 2017, she received the Association of Moving Image Archivists Alan Stark Award, which honors individuals making a significant contribution to the profession via special projects.
Kathleen Maguire is a media arts programmer at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Her work includes designing screenings for intergenerational audiences, working closely with artists to craft media-based performances, and curating media works for the Museum galleries. Recent projects include Light Play: Mechanical Entry Points, a multi year engagement highlighting artists who explore light art through mechanical technologies, and Field of View: Mapping Emerging Technologies, a series of temporal engagements examining cutting-edge use of immersive technologies in science and the arts. She was previously a part of the temporal programming group at the American Museum of Natural History and is a graduate of NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program.
Matt Malzkuhn is a PhD Candidate in Cultural Studies from George Mason University with a research focus on Deaf Made Home Movies during the advent of amateur filmmaking (1925) to the end of the silent era (1970’s). He is looking at how these films tell us about the performance and representation of deaf people and how their values are defined through their direct participation in the mode of production. As a business owner of a creative production company, he has developed and published sign language learning resources for iOS and Google Play devices. Matt is currently on faculty in the Department of ASL and Deaf Studies at Gallaudet University with specializations in ASL Literature, Critical Theory and Deaf Studies.
Anna McCarthy professor and department chair of Cinema Studies at New York University, is the author of Ambient Television (2001) and The Citizen Machine (2010). She coedited the anthology MediaSpace (2004) and for eight years was a coeditor of Social Text. She is the journal’s current web editor. Her research at present concerns relations between broadcasting and theocracy in twentieth century Ireland.
Brian Meacham is the Archive and Special Collections Manager at the Yale Film Study Center, where he oversees acquisition, conservation, and preservation of the print and pre-print material in the Yale Film Archive. He also helps program the “Treasures from the Yale Film Archive” public screening series, and teaches a course on film archiving in the Yale Film and Media Studies graduate program. He received a Certificate in Film Preservation from the L. Jeffery Selznick School of Film Preservation in 2006, and has worked at the Harvard Film Archive and the Academy Film Archive.
Evan Meaney is an American-born artist and researcher, based at the University of South Carolina. His new media practices explore liminalities and glitches of all kinds; equating failing data to ghosts, seances, and archival hauntology. Evan has been an artist in residence at the Experimental Television Center and the Wexner Center for the Arts, a research affiliate at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and a founding member of GLI.TC/H. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the US Department of Energy, and other generous entities. Since 2011, Evan’s work has been represented by the Video Data Bank in Chicago. INTERESTS: Gaming, teaching, ghosts, new media, experimental film, and beyond.
Barbara Miller is Senior Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at Museum of the Moving Image, where she organizes exhibitions and directs the content of MoMI’s permanent collection of material culture related to film, television, and digital media. Major projects at MoMI include The Jim Henson Exhibition; Graphic Films and the Inception of 2001: A Space Odyssey; The Animation Art of Chuck Jones; and Born Digital: Pathways Towards Preservation, an Andrew W. Mellon-funded initiative to institute sustainable collection and exhibition practices related to digital media.
Candace Ming is the Project Manager and Archivist for the South Side Home Movie Project. Since 2015 she has overseen the expansion of the digital and physical archive and expanded its visibility through a series of public events. A graduate of the NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, Ming developed an infrastructure for archiving the vast collection of training films at the New York Police Department, and worked with curator Ron Magliozzi and conservator Peter Williamson at the Museum of Modern Art.
Charles Musser debuts his new documentary For John Carlos: (Y)our Family Album at Museum of the Moving Image the day after the 11th Orphan Film Symposium on Love, April 15, 2018. A professor at Yale, he teaches courses on film and media historiography, American cinema and documentary film (both critical studies and production). More at charlesmusser.com.
Eva Näripea, PhD, is Director of Film Archives of the National Archives of Estonia, senior researcher at Estonian Academy of Arts, visiting professor at Tallinn University and founding co-editor of Baltic Screen Media Review. She has contributed book chapters to internationally published volumes, and (co)edited several special issues and anthologies on Eastern European cinemas, including (with Ewa Mazierska and Lars Kristensen), Postcolonial Approaches to Eastern European Cinema: Portraying Neighbours on Screen (2014). Her research interests include spatial representations and peripheral practices in Estonian cinema, histories of Eastern European science fiction film, and reflections of neoliberalism in recent Estonian cinema.
Brigitte Paulowitz is a film preservationist at the Lichtspiel / Kinemathek Bern and responsible for the film collections there. She completed the L Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at George Eastman House in 2001, worked at Haghefilm Laboratories in the Netherlands, the Austrian Filmmuseum in Vienna, the Thai Film Archive in Bangkok and AV Preservation at retro.ch in Lausanne before moving to Bern. She has been giving classes in film preservation in Switzerland and Thailand. She is currently working on a project with the Swiss Army Film Archive, a project of Lebensreform movement films from the 1920s through the 1940s, and the Theo Zwicky Collection (jazz from the 1930s to the 1950s).
Jennifer Peterson is the author of Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film (Duke University Press, 2013). Her articles have been published in Cinema Journal, Camera Obscura, The Moving Image, Getty Research Journal, and numerous edited book collections including Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States (2012) and the forthcoming Hollywood on Location: An Industry History (Rutgers UP). She is working on a book tentatively entitled Cinema’s Wilderness Past: The Dramaturgy of Nature on Screen Before the 1960s. She is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at Woodbury University in Los Angeles.
Paola Prestes Penney is a Brazilian documentarian and screenwriter. A Fine Arts graduate, she is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Media and Audiovisual Processes Department of the School of Communications and Arts, University of São Paulo. Her research focuses on amateur movie making. Over the past few years, she´s been a guest lecturer at the Museum of Image and Sound of São Paulo, SESC (Serviço Social do Comércio), Itaú Cultural, and also in postgraduate courses at Istituto Eur\copeo di Design, Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado, and Fundação Getúlio Vargas in São Paulo.
Greg Pierce is a Capricorn, film programmer, soccer player/coach, stunted musician, accidental archivist, and ad nauseum dot dot dot. During the day he is the Associate Curator of Film and Video at The Andy Warhol Museum where he continues to work on a project to digitize Warhol’s entire five-year filmic output from 1963 to 1968. Recently he co-edited the book Andy Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls, which will be published and released by D.A.P. this month. During his off hours Pierce is the custodian of The Orgone Archive, a proudly fringe motion picture archive and screening outfit based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as well as the stunted guitarist in Merce Lemon and Close Prisons. He is just beginning the second half of his life.
Isaac Prusky is an MA candidate in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management at Ryerson University (’18). Originally from Southern Alberta, Canada, he has a background in digital project management and holds a BFA in Theatre, Music, and Art from the University of Lethbridge. He is currently completing his residency and thesis at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, where is he developing collections management strategies and assisting with educational outreach for the Reserve Film and Video Collection.
Charlene Regester is an Associate Professor in the Department of African, African American, & Diaspora Studies and Affiliate Faculty with the Global Cinema Minor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Film and Video, Choice Reviews for Academic Libraries, and The Projector Journal. Her 2018 publications include: “A Matter of Race and Gender: Lady Sings the Blues (1972) and the Hollywood Canon,” in The Hollywood Renaissance (Bloomsbury); “Black Like Me,” in Books to Film: Cinematic Adaptations of Literary Works (Gale Cengage); and “Paralyzed in a Jungle of Racial Torment and Drowning in a Sea of Self-Hate: Home of the Brave and A Soldier’s Story” in African American Cinema through Black Lives Consciousness (Wayne State University Press). She presented a paper about Oscar Micheaux at the first Orphan Film Symposium in 1999.
KJ Relth is a film programmer at the UCLA Film and Television Archive) as well as a writer and lecturer based in Los Angeles. Currently, Relth is a film programmer, recently mounting “Working Girls,” a ten-night series focusing on depictions of women in the workplace. She has served on the juries of festivals, including Fantastic Fest and the Denver Film Festival, and is in her second year as an associate shorts programmer for AFI Fest. Relth previously served on the programming team at the Cinefamily, and has presented film programs at the Bob Baker Marionette Theater, the Vista Theater, Veggie Cloud, and Barnsdall Art Park. She holds an MA in Media Studies and Film from The New School, with a focus on representations of gender and sexuality in film and popular culture.
Beatriz Rodovalho is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3. She is also a teaching assistant at Université Vincennes-Saint-Denis – Paris 8. Her research focuses on the reuse of amateur films and other forms of nonhegemonic productions. She is a programmer of the documentary film festival Brésil en Mouvements (Paris).
Frank Roumen became the Director of Collections at EYE Filmmuseum in 2013. He started at the Nederlands Filmmuseum in 1988, working in the educational and programming departments. For more than twenty years Roumen has created film, television, music, and theater productions that feature archival material. He has produced feature-length films such as Peter Delpeut’s Diva Dolorosa (1999) and Gustav Deutsch’s Welt Spiegel Kino (2005). With Nico de Klerk, Roumen directed Tabee, a 2002 found footage production about the Dutch East Indies. For the opening of the EYE building in 2012, he selected images for Panorama, a permanent exhibition. He emceed the closing screening at Orphans 2014 in Amsterdam.
Sean Savage is a graduate of the NYU MIAP program and an archivist at the Academy Film Archive. He’s been a presenter at previous iterations of Orphans and a multiple contributor to The Moving Image journal. Home movies are a passion and his subject at Orphans 11. He has also been an organizer for Home Movie Day in three cities since 2005. Most recently he’s been an adviser to the Permanencia Voluntaria film archive in Tepoztlán, Mexico.
David Schwartz is Chief Curator of Museum of the Moving Image, where he has worked since 1985. He supervises more than 500 screenings per year, and is the curator of the online exhibition The Living-Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials 1952-2016. He teaches film aesthetics and history in the NYU Tisch Graduate Film production program.
Craig Shemin is President of the Jim Henson Legacy and a freelance writer and producer. His script for the Henson production The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss was nominated for a Writers Guild Award in 1998 and he received a 2011 Emmy nomination for Disney’s Tasty Time with ZeFronk. He produced video content for Jim Henson Exhibitions presented by the Smithsonian, the Center for Puppetry Arts, and Museum of the Moving Image, where he is guest curator for an ongoing Henson screening series. His award-winning documentary about Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas can be seen on the classic show’s 40th Anniversary DVD. Craig soon leaves for New Zealand where he is writing a live Jim Henson tribute concert starring Bret McKenzie, the Muppets, and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. He is the author of The Muppets Character Encyclopedia (2014).
Matt Soar is an intermedia artist and filmmaker in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. Soar’s project Lost Leaders (2011 onwards) is an archival, scholarly, and artistic exploration of the histories of US film leader standards. Outcomes have screened at ATA/Other Cinema (2015, 2018), Poetics & Politics documentary symposium (UCSC 2015), the Montreal Underground Film Festival (2014), and the Orphan Film Symposium (Amsterdam, 2014, Culpeper, Virginia, 2016). Soar is co-founder and director of the Montreal Signs Project, a growing collection of over 20 commercial and civic signs from around the city. In 2017 he curated, with Danica Evering, YMX: Migration, Land, and Loss after Mirabel, artist Cheryl Sim’s media installation exploring the legacy of the Montréal-Mirabel International Airport. He is also in post-production on Les Enseignistes de Montréal, a web documentary on the city’s histories of signmakers and signmaking.
Tzutzumatzin Soto has collaborated in the rescue and use of moving image collections in Mexico, where she has focused on the training of new archivists from community archives. She is currently Head of the Department of Videographic and Iconographic Collections of the Cineteca Nacional de México, where she also coordinates the contents of the Digital Video Library and the Archive Experiences Seminar. She is also part of the experimental film community around LEC (Experimental Film Lab).
Alexander Stark studied Media and History at the University of Trier (Germany) and graduated in 2013. From 2014 to 2017 he was research associate at the Department of Media Studies at Philipps University (Marburg, Germany). Since September 2017 he is part of the research collective “Configurations of Film” (Universities of Frankfurt a. M., Marburg and Mainz, among others) and is currently working on his doctoral thesis. The working title is “‘Die filmende Bäckersfrau’ – Elisabeth Wilms und der Amateur- und Gebrauchsfilm in Deutschland (1941-1981),” (“‘The Filming Baker’s Wife’ – Elisabeth Wilms and the Amateur Film and Useful Cinema in Germany”).
Courtney Stephens is a filmmaker and programmer. In Los Angeles, she co-programs Veggie Cloud, a microcinema that collaborates with local institutions, among them the Getty Museum, REDCAT, Human Resources, Blum and Poe, UCLA Film and Television Archive, and the Velaslavasay Panorama. Stephens attended the American Film Institute and was the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship and Sloan Scholarship. She is also a former editor of Cabinet magazine. Her films have screened at SXSW, Wexner Center for the Arts, the Royal Geographical Society, Flaherty NYC, Mumbai International Film Festival, and elsewhere. <courtneystephens.net>
Jacqueline Stewart is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago and directs the South Side Home Movie Project. Her research and teaching explore African American film cultures, as well as the archiving and preservation of moving images, and “orphan” media histories, including nontheatrical, amateur, and activist film and video. She co-curated the L.A. Rebellion Preservation Project at the UCLA Film and Television Archive and serves on the National Film Preservation Board.
Dan Streible directs the NYU Orphan Film Symposium. He published a history of the symposium in Film Festival Yearbook 5: Archival Film Festivals (2013) and the entry “Orphan Films” for Oxford Bibliographies Online. His recent publications include “The Film of Her: The Cine Poet Laureate of Orphan Films,” in The Films of Bill Morrison, edited by Bernd Herzogenrath (U of Amsterdam Press, 2018), and “Ro-Revus Talks About Race: South Carolina Malnutrition and Parasite Films, 1968-1975,” in Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film, edited by Allyson Nadia Field and Marsha Gordon (Duke UP, forthcoming). His associations include being associate professor of cinema studies at NYU, associate chair of the Department of Cinema Studies, and associate director of its Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program.
Juana Suárez is Director of the NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program. She combines her careers as a scholar, film critic, and media archivist/preservation activist. She holds an MA and a PhD in Latin American Literature (University of Oregon and Arizona State University, 2000) and an MA in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (NYU, 2013). Her research interests include media preservation, film archives, media archeology, administration of memory institutions, film studies, Latin American/Latino-a cinema, cultural studies and literature, gender studies, and immigration studies. She has been an organizer and a participant in MIAP’s annual Audiovisual Preservation Exchange Program (APEX) in Colombia, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Spain, and Brazil (2013-2018). She is currently developing a digital humanities collaborative project, tentatively entitled Kamani: Audiovisual Archives, Cultural History and the Digital Turn in Latin America, as well as a research project entitled Memoria Nacional/Movilidad transnacional: la experiencia fílmica colombiana en el extranjero en años recientes.
Ted Supalla produced and directed a documentary film on a Deaf filmmaker who recorded events of everyday Deaf culture from 1925 to the 1940s. Currently he is reconstructing the early grammar of American Sign Language and its literary traditions, through a structural analysis of ASL as recorded on historical films. He is a co-author of Sign Language Archaeology: Understanding Historical Roots of American Sign Language (2015). Supalla is a Professor of Neurology, Linguistics and Psychology at Georgetown University and the director of the Sign Language Research Lab. His lab hosts a Historical Sign Language Database as a resource tool for public use.
Dwight Swanson is co-founder of the Center for Home Movies and a co-creator of Home Movie Day, the now-international amateur film screening event. He produced the 35mm, feature-length compilation film Amateur Night: Home Movies from American Archives (2011). A graduate of the Selznick School of Film Preservation, he first spoke at an Orphan Film Symposium in 2001 and continues his evangelism in forums including AMIA conferences, the Bastard Film Encounter, and the foundational Letcher County Film Preservation Symposium and Moonshine Jamboree. Swanson has published journals including Film History and The Moving Image.
Simon Tarr is an artist, researcher, and educator. In addition to making films that have been screened on every continent (yes, even Antarctica), he creates live video shows and immersive environments that he has performed at Carnegie Hall, La MaMa, and around the world from Tokyo to Cairo. He serves on the National Film Preservation Board and is an associate professor of art at the University of South Carolina.
Charles Tepperman is Associate Professor and graduate program director in the Department of Communication, Media, and Film at the University of Calgary. Tepperman has published articles on nontheatrical film culture, film technology, and early cinema in Canada. He is the author of Amateur Cinema: The Rise of North American Moviemaking, 1923-1960 (University of California Press, 2015) and Director of the Amateur Movie Database Project (amateurcinema.org). His recent publications include “‘All the Wonderful Possibilities of Motion Pictures’: Hiram Percy Maxim and the Aesthetics of Amateur Filmmaking” in the award-winning collection, Amateur Movie Making: Aesthetics of the Everyday in New England Film, 1915-1960, edited by Martha McNamara and Karan Sheldon. Tepperman curated a reconstruction of the “1938 International Amateur Movie Show” which premiered at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto in 2018.
Frannie Trempe is a second-year student in NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program, currently completing a thesis on the history of metadata standardization and aggregation. She has previously worked at New York University Archives, Girl Scouts of the USA, and University of California, San Diego Libraries, and upon graduation from NYU will begin a full-time audiovisual archiving position at Cai Studio in New York City.
Louisa Trott is a graduate of the University of East Anglia’s Film Archiving program. In the UK, she worked with amateur film collections at the Imperial War Museum Film Archive and Screen Archive South East in Brighton. In 2005, she co-founded the Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound in Knoxville. Louisa is crazy about Dufaycolor – the topic of her first Orphans appearance in 2004! – particularly its use in the amateur market. She recently made an exciting Dufay discovery, and plans to publish her research on it soon. She currently works as Digital Projects Librarian at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Mila Turajlic is a filmmaker working in Belgrade and Paris, best known for Cinema Komunisto (2010) and The Other Side of Everything (2017), winner of Best Feature-Length Documentary at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam.
Maria Vinogradova is a film and media historian specializing in the study of minor cinema practices, especially in the former USSR and other socialist contexts. Her doctoral dissertation, defended at NYU Cinema Studies with distinction, traces the history of amateur filmmaking in the Soviet Union. The project resulted in rediscovery of rare films previously unknown in the academic and archival community. This research was supported by an ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship in 2015-2016. She has published essays on amateur, experimental, and science films, and regularly presents her work at conferences and symposia. Vinogradova has programmed public screenings of Soviet and Eastern Bloc amateur films in New York, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Frankfurt, St. Petersburg, and San Sebastián, Spain.
Todd Wiener is the Motion Picture Archivist at UCLA Film & Television Archive. He manages print loans to and speaks at film festivals, museums, and other venues worldwide, including international festivals in London, Berlin, and Toronto, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Wiener is also the Archive’s liaison with donors and depositors, as well as archival partners such as the Sundance Film Festival, Outfest, the Film Noir Foundation, the Director’s Guild of America, and The Film Foundation.
Tami Williams is Associate Professor of Film Studies and English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the president of Domitor – the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema. She is co-editor of Global Cinema Networks (forthcoming-2018), editor of The Moving Image, 16.1on Early Cinema & the Archive (2016), author of Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations (2014), and co-editor of Performing New Media, 1895-1915 (2014). She also is an area coordinator for the Women Film Pioneers Project (France) and the Media Ecology Project: Library of Congress Paper Print Pilot.
Isabel Wschebor is a PhD student at l’École Nationale des Chartes in Paris with a master’s degree in History from Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación, Universidad de la República (UdelaR) in Uruguay. She is a faculty member at the Historical Research Area and the Coordinator at the Audiovisual Preservation Laboratory in the University General Archive (Uruguay). She is a co-founder of the Interdisciplinary Cinema and Audiovisual Study Group along with PhD Georgina Torello at UdelaR. She has lead several projects and done research on archives and preservation in Uruguay, focusing on film archives. At the moment, her main research interest is the history of audiovisual heritage in Uruguay.
Lindsay Zarwell has worked as a film archivist in the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum since 2000. She conceived and develops the Archive’s public access database, acquires and catalogs original film materials, and manages preservation projects. Her work includes building the dynamic annotation tool in the Ephemeral Films Project (2011-2016, efilms.ushmm.org) and preserving the Claude Lanzmann SHOAH Collection of film outtakes. She served as expert trainer in curating sensitive archives in Albania in 2016 and is an active member of the Association of Moving Image Archivists. She has focused on the USHMM amateur film collections and co-authored an essay on home movies, “Yes, There Was a World: Prewar Jewish Life on Film” in Archäologie des Amateurfilms (2015).
Zhang Zhen is an associate professor in cinema studies and history at New York University, where she is also the founder and director of the Asian Film & Media Initiative. Her publications include the award-winning An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema 1896-1937 (2005), The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century (2007), and DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film (co-editor, 2015), as well as numerous articles in journals, anthologies and catalogues. She has curated film programs for the Lincoln Center of the Performing Arts, the Museum of Modern Art, and New York University, where she initiated the Reel China Biennial in 2001.