2021 Spring Conference Speakers
Audrey Amidon
Audrey Amidon is a specialist in the Motion Picture Preservation Lab at the National Archives and Records Administration, where she preserves and makes accessible the permanently valuable motion picture records of the U.S. government. She completed the film archive M.A. program at the University of East Anglia. Prior to NARA, Audrey worked with the Donald B. MacMillan film collection at the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum. She has written about NARA’s moving image holdings for the NARA blog The Unwritten Record since 2013.
Clara Auclair
Clara Auclair is a PhD candidate in visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester, in joint partnership with Université de Paris. She is the 2020-2022 George Eastman Museum fellow. Clara works on the history and memory of the French film industry settled in Fort Lee, New Jersey, in the 1910s. She is a graduate from the L. Jeffrey Selznick School for Film Preservation at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, and the Jean-Baptiste Siegel fellowship program at the Cinémathèque française in Paris, France. Clara is the francophone secretary of Domitor, the international society for the study of early cinema. She has been working with the Digital Scholarship Lab since 2016.
Snowden Becker
Snowden Becker is an independent scholar, archival educator, and consulting archivist who has served on the editorial board of The Moving Image since 2006. Her research interests focus on how audiovisual materials—especially nontheatrical media from home movies to police bodycam footage—are collected and preserved as part of our cultural heritage.
Brian Belak
Brian Belak is an archivist currently pursuing an MLIS at UCLA while working on audiovisual preservation for UCLA Library Special Collections. He also works with film & media for the Skid Row History Museum & Archive, Al Larvick Conservation Fund, and Home Movie Day, including co-organizing the virtual 2020 Home Movie Day in Los Angeles. Brian was previously Collections Manager and Client Services Director at Chicago Film Archives and projectionist for Doc Films at the University of Chicago.
Viviana García Besné
Filmmaker, archivist and activist for popular film preservation. Her first film Perdida, had its international premiere at the official selection of Telluride Film Festival and received several awards during its journey through festivals. She is the founder of the Permanencia Voluntaria Film Archive in Mexico, The Baticine: the only movie theatre in her small town and EL Green Room Zoom: a series of down to earth conversations with a focus on inspiration, vision and purpose with filmmakers and producers. She has collaborated with The Academy Film Archive, UCLA Film and Television Archive and Cinema Preservation Alliance to save and restore neglected films. All her restorations have premiered at Major Festivals including: Berlinale World Forum, TCM, L´Immagine Ritrovata, Morelia Film Festival and this summer she will premiere her latest restoration at Rotterdam. She is currently working in a multimedia project about memory and death: HYPERPHANTASIA. She is also a mother of two children and loves cooking for friends.
Lorena Bordigoni
Lorena Bordigoni (she/her) holds a BA in Art History From Universidad de Buenos Aires and a MA in Audiovisual Preservation Management from INA (French National Audiovisual Institute). She has worked as a digital restorer of motion picture film and collaborated in many different projects related to film preservation. Currently she is at work on a history of the last photo-chemical film lab in Argentina.
Guillaume Boure
Guillaume Boure (he/him) is an Independent Post Production Contractor for documentaries and oral history projects. Since 2018, he has provided media translation, sub-/soft-titling services and footage research for film production companies, repertory cinemas and international moving image organizations. In 2020-21, he is contracting with Kuiv Productions and the Oral History Projects department at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Guillaume co-founded and co-chairs with Louise Gerbelle the AMIA Student Chapter at INA sup – the French National Audiovisual Institute School. He graduated from INA with a Master’s in Audiovisual Heritage Management in 2020, after completing internships in experimental and artists’ film labs and archives in London, Paris and Gorizia (Italy). His mum is very proud.
Karen Chan
Karen Chan is the Executive Director of the Asian Film Archive (AFA) based in Singapore. She has been with the AFA since 2006 where she started work as an archivist. Under her tenure as Director, she has developed the AFA from a two-person team to becoming a subsidiary of the National Library Board Singapore. Apart from overseeing AFA’s operations, Karen teaches film literacy classes, contributes to film publications, and presents at film related events. She is the current President of the Southeast Asia-Pacific Audiovisual Archives Association (SEAPAVAA) and is a member of the Singapore Film Commission’s advisory committee. Her past experiences include being a teacher, working at the National Archives of Singapore, the National Arts Council, and the Natural History Museum in New York City.
Brendan Coates
Brendan Coates is a gardener, fermentation enthusiast, member of the Los Angeles Tenants Union, and the Sr. Archivist at Academy Oral History Projects, where he’s worked since 2018, focusing on all aspects of post-production, archiving, preservation, and access. Prior to this, he worked as the Audiovisual Digitization Technician at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he supervised the migration of a variety of materials, from “wax” cylinders to DigiBetas. He’s a graduate of the University of Michigan’s School of Information and has been working with open-source software since 2012, primarily focused on workflow and quality control automation.
Brad Collar
Brad Collar is the Senior Vice President of Technical Operations at WarnerMedia. In his current role Brad oversees both operations and strategy for the company’s global archives, the associated content preservation activities, content metadata, content security, DVD/Blu-ray production, and media supply chain asset readiness.
Prior to that Brad held various positions within Warner Bros Entertainment, including the position of Senior Vice President and General Manager, Global Digital Media Xchange (GDMX), where he had overall responsibility for the facility, and as Vice President of Technology where he was engaged in new media technology development and strategy.
Brad earned a BSEE and MBA from UCLA, and currently holds 21 granted patents. Brad is a member of the Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers, The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, and the Screen Actors Guild. He resides in Valencia, California with his wife and son.
Alicia Coombs
Alicia Coombs is Executive Director for the American Genre Film Archive (AGFA) in Austin, TX. She received a BA in Film Studies from Hampshire College where she focused on the topic of gender in horror and exploitation cinema, and her advisors failed at dissuading her from having the title “Sex, Blood and Celluloid” on her transcript. She has worked as a projectionist, script reader, production coordinator and accountant in film and television and co-programmer of monthly repertory screenings at Alamo Drafthouse. Experience in film handling led her to volunteering with AGFA at a time when the archive was rapidly expanding, and her unique background primed her for a full time position handling accounting and business affairs for the archive.
Laura Drake Davis
Laura Drake Davis is a Digital Project Specialist at the Library of Congress in the Moving Image Section. In this role, Laura processes born-digital moving image content, develops new workflows for born-digital content and develops strategies for metadata capture and transformation. A certified archivist since 2007, Laura holds the Master of Library Science degree from the University of Maryland College Park.
Sebastian del Castillo
Sebastian del Castillo is the Head of Film Restoration for the American Genre Film Archive (AGFA) in Austin, Texas. Sebastian has a BS degree from The University of Texas at Austin in Radio, Television, and Film specializing in film production. Sebastian got his start working as a grip, gaffer, and cinematographer on film productions and then began working for several non-profit film organizations such as The Cinemaker Co-op in Austin and The Northwest Film Forum in Seattle as Technical Director. In 2001 Sebastian began working as a Negative Cutter for Deluxe where he acquired skills in post-production and film handling. In 2010 Sebastian joined forces with The Alamo Drafthouse Cinema where he worked as a projectionist for 10 years – projecting 16mm, 35mm, 70mm, and digital. While working for The Alamo Drafthouse Sebastian began volunteering for AGFA before being hired on as Head Archivist. As AGFA expanded beyond being a genre film archive and active lending library to include theatrical distribution and being a home video label, Sebastian switched gears from working in the physical archive to doing film scanning, digital restoration, color grading, DCP creation, digital asset management, and mastering.
Rachel Del Gaudio
Since 2012, Rachel Del Gaudio has been organizing “Mostly Lost” workshops at the Library of Congress. Her dedication to identifying unknown films extends to her role as chair of AMIA’s Nitrate Committee and the Flickr page that she runs. As chair, she continues to work to make regulations surrounding nitrate film more approachable and adhering to them more affordable for institutions of all sizes. A graduate of Chapman University with a bachelor’s degree in Film Studies, she worked at the Academy Film Archive before transferring to the Library of Congress in 2009.
Caitlin Denny
Caitlin Denny is an archivist and filmmaker. She earned a Master’s Degree in Library and Information Science from UCLA in 2017, and a BFA degree in Media Arts from California College of the Arts in 2009. She has exhibited her film and video work internationally and has curated exhibitions in California, New York, and France. She is co-creator of the former online-based art gallery JstChillin, a landmark net-art project that garnered critical attention toward internet-based artwork. Denny is currently working on a feature-length experimental documentary about a lost film starring Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters titled Atlantis Risen. She also works as a Senior Media Archivist at Paramount Pictures in Los Angeles.
C. Díaz
C. Díaz is a filmmaker, colorist, and archivist from the Rio Grande Valley, Texas. Her films explore the alchemy of celluloid through the use of DIY, analog, and digital techniques. Exploring the interconnectedness of inner and outer landscapes are paramount in her art practice. She blends abstraction with documentary to unearth intimate and sacred interactions between the physical Earth and the people who inhabit it. Her desire to collect forgotten and discarded memories has led to her love of archives, home movies and oral history. She frequently works with the Oral History Projects at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences as the department’s Colorist and Spanish-language Editor for their Visual History Project. She was a project manager, film inspector, scanning technician and remastering colorist on numerous film restoration projects such as Belladonna of Sadness, The Estate of Ana Mendieta, various titles for Fandor, special collections for the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, and her family’s Super 8mm home movie collection. A multifaceted being, she also enjoys collecting rocks, reggaeton, the ocean, tracking moon phases, watching telenovelas and drinking aloe water.
Emma Dickson
I’m a Data Engineer, Time Based Media Technician and Artist. I’m fascinated by outdated technology and the process of translation and obsolescence in technical languages. I currently work at Artsy as a Data Engineer and Webrecorder as a General Developer.
Ivy Donnell
Ivy Donnell is a Preservation Specialist in the Motion Picture Preservation Lab at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in College Park, Maryland. She received a MLIS in Archives and Digital Curation from the University of Maryland and a BS in Electronic Media and Film from Towson University. Ivy previously worked at Colorlab in Rockville, Maryland, specializing in preservation projects for archives, museums, and filmmakers. Special interests include animation and experimental film.
Jim Duran
Jim Duran started with the Vanderbilt Television News Archive in 2018, coming from Boise State University where he spent 10 years in Special Collections and University Archives. He is the Director of the Archive and is also the Curator of Born-Digital collections. Duran has master’s degrees in Library and Information Science and History, emphasizing in library administration, born-digital preservation and 19th and 20th century American history.
Courtney Fellion
Courtney Fellion (she/her) is a lecturer at San Francisco State University. She also works as the Administrative Associate at the San Francisco Cinematheque and as a registrar for a fine art handling company in the Bay Area. She has held curatorial research positions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Denver Art Museum, and has edited the Canyon Cinemazine for almost a decade.
Mia Ferm
Mia Ferm is a recent graduate of the Preservation & Presentation of the Moving Image MA program at the University of Amsterdam. For about a decade she has been a curator for and co-director of Cinema Project in Portland, Oregon, a collective that presents public screenings of experimental film and video. Before returning to school in 2019, she worked as the Education Programs Manager at the Northwest Film Center. Currently, she volunteers her time at the Oregon Historical Society, focusing on video materials related to Portland public access television. Her previous degrees are from NYU in Cinema Studies and UCSD in Film History and Production.
Karianne Fiorini
KarianneFiorini is an independent film archivist and curator. Since 2003, she has run different home movie projects and has been a frequent contributor to international meetings and symposia. She is among the founders of the first Italian Home Movie Archive, in Bologna, where she was manager of Film Collections and Cataloguing for twelve years (2003-2015). She has been theco-curator of the International Media Mixer project promoted by the Chicago Film Archives (2017-2018). Since 2017, she has run an ongoing national survey on home movie archives in Italy with the Istituto Centrale per gli Archivi – MiBACT and co-curating an ongoing Italian educational project on how to reuse home movie collections in new works of art, called Re-framing home movies. Since2015 she has co-curated a Super8 film section at the Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema di Pesaro and in 2019 she was part of the curatorial team of the Home Movie Day and Night: The 24-Hour Home Movie Marathon project, promoted by the Center for Home Movies. She is among the founding group of archivists, filmmakers, and home movie archives of the newly-organized Re-framing Home Movies Association (Milano, Italy), of which she is the President.
Brenda Flora
Brenda Flora is the Curator of Moving Images and Recorded Sound at the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans, Louisiana. She became the Center’s first audiovisual archivist in 2010, and has been responsible for creating and implementing AV policy and overseeing numerous grant-funded projects in that time. She holds a Master’s degree in Film Archiving from the University of East Anglia. She currently serves as co-chair of AMIA’s Advocacy Committee of the Board.
Xaviera Flores
Librarian and Archivist at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, Flores oversees all library, archives, and museum services, including community outreach, instruction, grant projects, and donor relations. Flores has worked in libraries since 2004 and holds a BA in Film Studies and MS in Library and Information Science with an Archives and Audiovisual Preservation concentration.
Louise Gerbelle
Louise Gerbelle graduated in 2019 from INA sup – the French National Audiovisual Institute School, with a Master’s in Audiovisual Heritage Management. She also holds a BA in Film and History of Arts from Sorbonne University in Paris. She has previously interned with several organizations involved with film preservation and curation: Cinémathèque française, Cannes Classics (Cannes Film Festival) and Potemkine Films. She worked for the New York-based streaming platform Le Cinéma Club in 2019. She regularly writes for the quarterly film heritage journal Revus et Corrigés. In early 2021, Louise dedicates her time between co-chairing the AMIA Student Chapter at INA sup, which she co-founded with Guillaume Boure, and co-curating two major international short film festivals.
Dave Gibson
Dave Gibson is a Library Technician in the Moving Image Section of the Library of Congress’ National Audio Visual Conservation Center. A graduate of the inaugural class of UCLA’s Moving Image Archive Studies program in 2002, Dave joined the staff of the LOC in 2006 and, since then, has had the opportunity to process and create metadata for a wide variety of analog and digital collections, most notably the Library’s collection of video games.
Michael B. Gillespie
Michael B. Gillespie is author of Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (Duke University Press, 2016) and co-editor of Black One Shot, an art criticism series on ASAP/J. He is an associate professor of film at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center, CUNY.
Ari Green
Ari Green is a first year Ph.D. student in Public History at NC State University. She’s currently an Archival Processing Assistant at NCSU’s Special Collections. Most of her experience lies in historic preservation and digital preservation where she prioritizes maintaining and preserving the built environment. As an AMIA Fellow, she had the opportunity of working with California Revealed. In the past, Ari has worked for Sacramento’s Central Library and the Center of Sacramento History as a digitization intern.
Micah Gottlieb
Micah Gottlieb is a time-based media archivist and film programmer based in Los Angeles. He is currently an MLIS candidate at UCLA and is the co-chair of the AMIA UCLA Student Chapter. From 2016 to 2019, he was the assistant programmer of the Quad Cinema in New York, which screened hundreds of archival film prints and digital restorations from repositories across the globe. He graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 2013 with a bachelor’s in film studies and French. He recently completed internships at LACMA and the AFI Library, and is currently writing a master’s thesis on the landscape of alternative and archival moving-image exhibition in Los Angeles.
Valeria Dávila Gronros
Valeria Dávila Gronros is a Master of Library and Information Studies graduate student at the University of Alabama, specializing in Archives with a focus in audiovisual archiving. A native of Argentina, she earned a Bachelor of Arts in Film Studies at Universidad del Cine and worked digitally restoring Latin American film heritage at Cinecolor Digital before moving to the USA in 2016. Doing this work, she became passionate about audiovisual preservation, which led her to attend the FIAF Film Preservation & Restoration School Latin America in 2017. An emergent audiovisual archivist, she currently works at Oregon State University Libraries and Press (OSULP), helping preserve and provide access to oral histories and audiovisual materials from the Special Collections & Archives. Prior to this position, she worked as a digitization technician at OSULP and interned at Yale University Film Archive.
May Hong HaDuong
May Hong HaDuong is the director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Prior to her appointment to UCLA this year, May served for 13 years at the Academy Film Archive. An active AMIA member of over 15 years, she has expertise on the complexities surrounding access to moving images, including the programming, cataloging, conservation, preservation, research and use of physical and digital elements. She received a Bachelor of Arts at Wellesley College and Master of Arts in Moving Image Archive Studies at the UCLA.
Katie Higley
Katie Higley is a sophomore at Central Michigan University (CMU) studying Public History, Museum Studies, Anthropology, and Cinema Studies. At CMU, she is a McNair Scholar currently studying how Michigan Museums are utilizing their film collections. She is interested in film preservation and how films can be a valuable teaching tool in Museums.
Heidi Holmstrom
Heidi Holmstrom has been a Motion Picture Preservation Specialist at the National Archives and Records Administration since 2009. She earned an M.A. in History, with a concentration in Archives and Records Management, from Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. She currently serves as the Secretary of the Board of Managers for the American Baptist Historical Society.
Hillary Howell
Hillary is an entertainment archivist with an extensive background managing all the aspects of studio and production company collections. While getting her Master’s degree in Moving Image Archive Studies from UCLA, Hillary interned for the Women in Film Foundation and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Archive. Working at studios as diverse as New Line Cinema, The Jim Henson Company, Jerry Bruckheimer Films, NBCUniversal and Lionsgate Entertainment, Hillary curated diverse collections of media assets as well as props, costumes, photography and ephemera. Some career highlights include discovering and restoring a Jim Henson animated short called “Alexander the Grape” from found audio recordings, animated scene trims and storyboards; restoring serial killer props from CSI: Crime Scene Investigation for display in the Bruckheimer offices; and preserving the John Wick films so they can be enjoyed by future generations. When she is not at work Hillary knits, sews, binges Parks and Recreation and plays with her dog Jane Pawsten.
Nathan Jones
Nathan Jones is still relatively new to his role as Curator of Television News Collections, Vanderbilt Television News Archive. In his nearly seven years at Vanderbilt, he has transitioned from medical librarian, to archivist. Before coming to Vanderbilt, Nathan’s past archival experience included working in a presidential library and archive as well as, establishing the corporate archive of a major food manufacture. His professional interests include media preservation, disinformation, propaganda, and information literacy. Nathan has a master’s degree in Information Science. He resides in Nashville, Tennessee with his partner and their beloved Norwegian Elkhound, Bjorn.
Andrea Leigh
Andrea Leigh is Moving Image Processing Unit Head at the Library of Congress National Audio Visual Conservation Center. Previously, she was a cataloger at the UCLA Film & Television Archive from 2000-2008, and held technical service positions at the UCLA Library, Cal State University, Northridge, Walt Disney Company, and Creative Artists Agency. She has an M.L.I.S in Information Studies and B.A. in Theater Arts from UCLA. She is currently serving her second term as an AMIA Director of the Board.
Andres Levinson
Historian graduated from University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and a PhD candidate in History from the same university under the direction of David Oubiña. Currently in charge of the Film Research Area and Chief Curator at the Museum of Cinema of Buenos Aires. Specialist in the history of silent films, Film Preservation and Archiving of audiovisual media. Professor of Argentine History at UBA and History of Documentary Film in the postgraduate area of the National University of Tres de Febrero, he was a professor of Film History at the Film University (FUC) and at the University of New York. He has curated exhibitions and retrospectives at various festivals and exhibitions. Responsible for the preservation and restoration of different Argentine Films, exhibited at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, Orphans Film Symposium in New York and at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone, Italy among others. He has participated in numerous congresses, published articles in magazines and books. He is the author of the book Cinema in the country of the wind, silent film in the Argentinean Patagonia.
Heather Linville
Heather Linville is the supervisor of the Motion Picture Laboratory at the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center where she is responsible for managing 2K/4K digital and 35mm B/W photochemical film preservation workflows. Previously, she was a Film Preservationist at the Academy Film Archive. She has a B.A. in History, MLIS from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is a graduate of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at the George Eastman Museum.
Bertram Lyons
Bertram leads AVP’s development team to create innovative, flexible, and user-center software for AVP projects and clients. His background specializations include the acquisition, management, and preservation of documentary, research, and cultural heritage collections. Before joining AVP, Bert worked as an archivist for the Alan Lomax Archive and the American Folklife Center (AFC) at the Library of Congress.
Josh B Mabe
Josh B Mabe is a librarian, filmmaker, and programmer. His films have screened at the New York Film Festival, Images Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, and the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival. He has programmed work in Chicago at Gallery 400, Links Hall, The Nightingale, University of Chicago, and the Chicago Underground Film Festival. He was formerly Program Director of Chicago Filmmakers and Programmer for the Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival (you can see him at work in episode 2 of the Netflix show Easy). He is currently a newspapers and microfilm librarian at the Harold Washington Library Center of the Chicago Public Library.
Sarah Mainville
Sarah Mainville (she/her/hers) is the Media Preservation Librarian at Michigan State University Libraries. In this role she heads the Media Preservation unit which leads and advocates for the stewardship of both analog and digital media within the Library as well as develop policy and workflows around digital preservation. She received her MSI from the University of Michigan’s School of Information. After school she was the Registrar at George Blood LP. There she was responsible for the tracking, condition assessment, environmental control, and treatment for all the media on-site. She came to MSU Libraries in 2018. Her interests include digital preservation advocacy, magnetic tape care, and ethics in preservation.
Pamela A. McClanahan
Pamela A. McClanahan has been the Digital Projects Librarian at University of Maryland Libraries since 2019 and serves as Project Manager for the Historic Maryland Newspapers Project, as well as other grant-based digitization initiatives. Prior to that, Pamela was an Archival and Record Management Fellow at the National Park Service. As a 2017 National Digital Stewardship Resident, she completed a user needs analysis of the digital Biodiversity Heritage Library at Smithsonian Libraries. Pamela has her MLS from the University of Maryland ischool specializing in Archives, Records and Information Management and holds a BA in History from Hood College.
Georgina Sanabria Medina
She studied a degree in Communication Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She has a master’s degree from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in the area of Communication and Education. She did another master’s degree in Educational Development from the National Pedagogical University. Participated in the creation of the National Phonotheque of Mexico where she was in charge of the Academic Coordination. In addition, she designed and taught courses and workshops on sound awareness. She has participated in national and international meetings on the subject related to the educational use of sound documents. She has been a teacher for more than 10 years and is currently doing her doctoral research on the subject of the use of artificial intelligence in sound files and its application in education.
Gustavo Menezes
Gustavo Menezes is the Associate Director of Cinelimite, a non-profit foundation dedicated to expanding access to the history of Brazilian Cinema in the United States. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Social Communication – Audiovisual from the University of Brasília.
CK Ming
CK Ming works at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture as a Media Conservation and Digitization Specialist. Previously they were the Archivist and Project Manager at the South Side Home Movie Project. They are currently a director of the board for the Center for Home Movies and Chair of the AMIA Diversity & Inclusion Fellowship Program Task Force.
Morgan Morel
Morgan is a video and electronics geek through and through. As BAVC’s Preservation Director he works to digitize and preserve stories and images created by artists, activists and filmmakers, especially those from under-represented communities and identities. His current preservation-based obsession is creating documentation for digitization station qualification (very geeky, right?). Morgan has been involved with Hackday since the very beginning, and thinks it’s a great way to meet some of the smartest folks in the field. In his free time Morgan likes to create ambient spaced-out tunes this guitars and synthesizers, perform raucous 70’s karaoke songs, and find new ways and exciting things to grill.
Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes
Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes is a visual anthropologist with expertise in the study of the British Empire, amateur and new media, gender, migration, memory, and cultural studies. Based at the University of Cambridge, she is Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Social Anthropology, a Member of the Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement, and an Official Fellow and Graduate Tutor at Clare Hall College. For the past twenty years, she has researched, taught both undergraduate and postgraduate courses, and published on themes such as national memories and global identities, colonial (amateur) films, women film and media practices, media and colonial architecture, media of war and trauma, and new and digital media. She also often supervises for various papers offered by the Department of Social Anthropology and the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. In both her research and teaching at Cambridge, she has made extensive use of and assisted with the establishment of online film archives of amateur (colonial) media such as Images of Empire (Bristol), Colonial Film (London), and the online archive held by the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge. She completed a Ph.D. in Film and Media Studies on ‘British Identities in Amateur Films from India and Australia, 1920s–1940s’ at the University of Bristol in 2008. Annamaria is the founder of the Amateur Cinema Studies Network, the first international project promoting amateur cinema/media studies. She has published extensively on issues of amateur and new media, imperial visual culture, gender and memory including ‘De-Illustrating the History of the British Empire’ (editor, Routledge, 2021), ‘Amateur Media: Film, Digital Media and Participatory Cultures’ (with Susan Aasman, Routledge, 2019), ‘British Women Amateur Filmmakers: National Memories and Global Identities’ (with Heather Norris Nicholson, Edinburgh University Press, 2018), and ‘Visual Histories of South Asia’ (with Marcus Banks, Primus Ratna Sagar, 2017). Further information about Annamaria’ research projects and publications is available at http://cambridge.academia.edu/AnnamariaMotrescuMayes.
Joshua Ng
Joshua Ng is the Digital Preservation Analyst at Archives New Zealand. Usually he is responsible for ensuring processes are in place to maintain the integrity of the Government Digital Archive. Recently he has been heavily involved in Utaina!, a cross-agency joint AV Preservation Project prioritising at-risk audiovisual magnetic media. He is also a firm believer in community owned open source technology and tools.
Devin Orgeron
Devin edits THE MOVING IMAGE and really thinks you should submit something. Seriously! We have special issues, but there’s always an open call! He returns emails, thinks of you as a colleague, and is probably as excited about this stuff as you are.
Pamela Vizner Oyarce
Pamela is a media archivist from Chile with international experience in film, video, audio and digital preservation. Pamela currently works as a Consultant for the firm AVP, where she focuses on digital preservation, technology selection and implementation, and management of software development projects. She holds a BA in Music and Sound Sciences from Universidad de Chile and an MA in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation from NYU, where she currently is an Adjunct Professor. Pamela has participated in NYU’s Audiovisual Preservation Program (APEX) since 2013 and in the Red Iberoamericana de Preservación Digital de Archivos Sonoros y Audiovidsuales (RIPDASA) since 2019. Pamela is a passionate member of the international archiving community and is always looking for ways to integrate diverse dialogue for mutual collaboration.
Liza Palmer
Liza Palmer is managing editor for the Association of Moving Image Archivists’ The Moving Image; co-editor-in-chief of the magazine Film Matters; and contributing editor for Film International. She is a librarian at Brunswick Community College and lecturer in Film Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
Michael Pazmino
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Michael Pazmino received his BA from the University of California, Berkeley in Film and Media Studies where he discovered his passion for audiovisual archiving through an internship at the Pacific Film Archive. He went on to attend UCLA’s Moving Image Archive Studies program where he received his Master of Arts in Moving Image Archiving in 2016. Although interested in all aspects of audiovisual archiving and preservation, his current research interests lie in advocating and bringing greater awareness to the preservation and access of audiovisual works created by racially marginalized communities, as well as examining the inherently problematic relationship between moving image pornography and archives.He has experience volunteering and working for various non-profit and corporate institutions throughout the years such as The Pacific Film Archive, USC Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive, el Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Nickelodeon Animation Studio, the Academy Film Archive and Señal 3 La Victoria (Santiago, Chile). He is currently a film archivist for the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
Ivan Peycheff
Ivan Peycheff is the Head of Film Archive for the American Genre Film Archive (AGFA) in Austin, TX, and an avid film collector. Ivan studied traditional animation at the Art Institute of Seattle and the James L. Coffin School of Animation. In 2000 he got his start in the world of film as a volunteer projectionist at the Grand Illusion Cinema in Seattle, WA. There, Ivan worked his way up to Head Programmer and in 2008 signed on as a programmer with the Olympia Film Society (All Freakin’ Night 2008-2010, Feastival Programmer 2010). Ivan left the Grand Illusion Cinema in 2013 and relocated to Austin, TX in 2015 where he started Bat City Cinema, a 16mm screening series dedicated to weird and obscure films. In 2016, Ivan joined AGFA as a volunteer archivist and in 2019 was made Head Archivist. Earlier this year he was promoted to Head of Film Archive; he maintains the physical archive and oversees all the scanning work.
Robin C. Pike
Robin Pike is the Manager, Digital Conversion and Media Reformatting at the University of Maryland managing digitization operations across seven College Park Libraries. She has been Co-PI of an NEH National Digital Newspaper Program grant for three phases and other grants funded by NEH and CLIR. She currently serves on the Steering Committee of the DLF Project Managers Group. She holds an MLIS specializing in Archives and Records Management from the University of Pittsburgh.
William Plotnick
William Plotnick is the Executive Director of Cinelimite, a non-profit foundation dedicated to expanding access to the history of Brazilian Cinema in the United States. William is a current graduate student at New York University’s MIAP program. He holds a Master’s degree in Cinema Studies from Columbia University and a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Massachusetts in Comparative Literature.
Patrice-Andre “Max” Prud’homme
Patrice-Andre “Max” Prud’homme, PhD, is the Director of Digital Curation at the Oklahoma State University Library. He provides leadership and management in the areas of digital preservation, curation and discovery of digital resources. He manages the processing of digital materials and their associated metadata and experiments with machine learning to increase the visibility and relevance of digital collections for research and education.
Lorena Ramírez-López
Lorena Ramírez-López is an alum from the National Digital Stewardship Residency of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, a graduate from the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program at New York University, and member of XFR Collective. She currently works as a consultant at Myriad and community manager for the webrecorder project. She has been a moving image specialist for the past 5 years; involved in AMIA since 2013; and chair of the AMIA International Outreach Committee since 2016. A native New Yorker from Queens, Lorena has been involved in open-source projects, hackathons, and international collaborations.
Brian Real
Brian Real, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Information and Library and Information Science at Southern Connecticut State University. He holds a PhD in Information Studies and an MLS from the University of Maryland. His research is split between analyses of the modern social impact of public libraries and the historical impact of federal policy on film preservation. Dr. Real has published in The Moving Image, Library Quarterly, Public Library Quarterly, Information Technology and Libraries, Journal of Archival Organization, and Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television.
Perla Olivia Rodriguez Resendiz
Researcher at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. PhD in Documentation from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She coordinates the Ibero-American Network of Digital Preservation of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (RIPDASA). She is Vice-President of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA). She was distinguished with the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Recognition 2019 awarded by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), was Deputy Director of Production at Radio Educación and coordinated the Laboratory of Artistic Sound Experimentation (LEAS). For more than two decades, she has implemented programmes for the training and safeguarding of sound and audiovisual archives at national and international level. He coordinated the International Seminar on Sound and Audiovisual Archives from 2001 to 2013 and, from 2015, the International Congress on Digital Archives organised at UNAM. She coordinated the founding staff of the Fonoteca Nacional de México and was director of the Promotion and Dissemination of Sound at this institution from 2008 to 2013.
Kelly Robinson
Kelly Robinson is a freelance writer and independent researcher with a particular interest in horror films, popular culture, and weird history. She is a two-time finalist for the Bram Stoker Award. Her essay, “Where the Wild Roses Grow: The Strange Allure of Murder Ballads” appears in the book Under My Thumb: Songs That Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them (Repeater Books, 2017), which was selected as one of Vogue magazine’s best books of the year. She is a recipient of the Horror Writers Association’s Rocky Wood Memorial Scholarship for Non-Fiction Writing, and is the founder, host, and curator of Knoxferatu, a silent horror film festival in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Josh Romphf
Josh Romphf is currently a software developer in the Digital Scholarship Department at the University of Rochester’s River Campus Libraries. He is a graduate of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation, where he also teaches classes on FFmpeg and video encoding.
Melanie Rozencwajg
Melanie is a creative entrepreneur who recently cofounded Archive Valley, a platform connecting archives sources with filmmakers, producers and archive researchers looking for archival footage for their current productions. Today Archive Valley is home to the largest international community of content creators working with archival footage and many productions seen recently on majors streaming platforms and national broadcasters have used Archive Valley.
Angela Schmidt
Angela Schmidt is film archivist for the Alaska Film Archives at the Alaska and Polar Regions Collections & Archives at University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). She has served in a variety of positions with the Alaska Film Archives since 2000, and became its director in 2013. She holds degrees in Journalism from Iowa State University and Wildlife Biology from UAF. In 2015, she received a master’s degree in Arctic and Northern Studies from UAF. She serves on the board of the Alaska Historical Society
Annie Schweikert
Annie Schweikert is a digital archivist at Stanford Libraries, where she processes, preserves, and makes accessible born-digital archival collections. Within AMIA, she is Co-Chair of the Open Source Committee and collaborator with the Continuing Education Advisory (CEA) Task Force. In her free time she is probably on a bike or a trail.
Emily Sherwood
Emily Sherwood is Director of Digital Scholarship and Studio X at University of Rochester’s River Campus Libraries. She is an alum of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellowship Program and the EDUCAUSE/CLIR Leading Change Institute. Emily holds a doctorate in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. As principal investigator for the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) funded New York Data Carpentries Library Consortium Planning Grant, Emily works with colleagues from Rochester, Syracuse, Colgate, and Cornell to extend data literacy in central and western New York.
Rob Stone
Rob created and co-directs the “Mostly Lost” film identification workshops along with Rachel Del Gaudio. Prior to the Library of Congress Rob worked at the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the USC-Warner Bros. Archive. In addition to his career long obsession with identifying the unknown, Rob works to bringing more awareness to the unappreciated or forgotten aspects of Film history. Rob holds an MLIS from San Jose State University.
Juana Suárez
Juana Suárez is the Director of the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program at New York University (NYU MIAP). She is a media preservation specialist and a scholar in Latin American Cinema. She holds a Ph.D. in Latin American Literature from Arizona State University, and M.A. degrees from the University of Oregon and New York University. Author of Cinembargo Colombia: Critical Essays on Colombian Cinema (2009), published in English (Palgrave, 2012), and Sites of Contention: Cultural Production and the Discourse of Violence in Colombia (published in Spanish 2010); co-editor of Humor in Latin American Cinema (2015). She is the translator to Spanish of A Comparative History of Latin American Cinema by Paul A. Schroeder-Rodríguez (Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2020). She is currently working on a book tentatively entitled Moving Images Archives, Cultural History and The Digital Turn in Latin America. She is the coordinator of arturita.net, a collaborative digital humanities project on Latin American AV archives.
Dwight Swanson
Dwight Swanson has worked as an archivist for American film and video collections in Alaska, Maine, Kentucky, and Washington, DC. He has lectured and written extensively on home movies and amateur film history and has organized conferences on amateur, nontheatrical, and medical films. He was a co-founder of Home Movie Day and the Center for Home Movies, where he spearheaded and co-produced a number of curatorial home movie projects, including Living Room Cinema, Amateur Night and “Home Movie Day and Night: The 24-Hour Home Movie Marathon”. In 2020, he co-curated the screening series “Other Histories: Amateur Films on the National Film Registry”.
Charles Tepperman
Charles Tepperman is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, Media and Film at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Amateur Cinema: The Rise of North American Moviemaking, 1923-1960, and director of the Amateur Movie Database project.
Gianmarco Torri
Gianmarco Torri is an independent film curator. His focus are diary film and autobiographical cinema, found footage, amateur cinema and the creative re-use of home movies, essay film, low-budget/self-produced documentary. In 2003 he was among the founders of the first Italian home movie archive, in Bologna, where until 2014 he was in charge for the archive development strategies and the film collecting projects as well as for public presentations, seminars and workshops on the archive activities. Since 2015 he is working as a development strategy consultant for Italian amateur film archives, at designing and managing collecting projects, valorization activities and training courses. Together with Karianne Fiorini, he is the curator of Re-framing home movies project in Italy and is among the founders of the association with the same name. He is in charge for the audiovisual collections of the CTU – University of Milan and a member of the Scientific Committee of the Pesaro Film Festival. Since 2019 he is part of the board of directors of the INEDITS European Association as General secretary.
Brianna Toth
I work as a Preservation Archivist at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Film Archive on the Blackhawk Films Collection and as the Assistant Archivist at the Bob Baker Marionette Theater. My current research is concerned with the obsolescence of technical expertise within the field of moving image archiving and preservation. In tandem with this research, I also serve as the Co-Chair of the AMIA Continuing Education Advisory (CEA) Task Force. I have a Masters in Library Information Science with a focus on Media Archival Studies (MLIS MAS) from UCLA and hold a B.A. in Art History from the University of the Pacific. As an undergraduate, I also studied at Goldsmiths College in London in their Visual Cultures Department.
Danielle Townsend
Ms. Townsend is pursuing her MS in Library Science at Clarion University of Pennsylvania. She is passionate about audiovisual archiving & preservation as well as sharing BIPOC histories & culture. Ms. Townsend is currently aiming to intersect her audiovisual archival & preservation expertise with exploring how data can be used to identify the gaps in archival collections, push BIPOC stories further into the center and improve accessibility to this material. She is also excited about expanding her role within the AMIA community, particularly with supporting the Diversity & Inclusion Task Force. Ms. Townsend expects to graduate from Clarion at the conclusion of the 2021 fall semester. She is looking forward to completing her degree and becoming involved in more projects.
Joe Travers
Joe has been playing drums in the Los Angeles area for over twenty seven years. A Berklee College Of Music graduate, Joe moved to LA in 1992 and by March 1993 he had landed the gig with Dweezil & Ahmet Zappa’s group “Z”. Since then Joe has gone on to play for many acts over the years including Duran Duran, Lisa Loeb, Rich Robinson (The Black Crowes), Billy Idol, Zappa Plays Zappa, Eric Johnson and Joe Satriani. When Joe is not on the road, he spends his time being the “Vaultmeister” for the Zappa Family Trust. This entails being in charge of archiving and preserving the legacy of legend Frank Zappa, working closely with the Trust co-producing and supervising future projects over the last 21 years. Joe is currently playing for The Zappa Band.
Patricia Ledesma Villon
Patricia Ledesma Villon is a graduate student at the MLIS/Media Archival Studies program at UCLA. She previously worked as a production archival assistant with the Center for Asian American Media for the recent PBS documentary The Asian Americans and is a co-programmer for Light Field, an international exhibition of recent and historical experimental moving image art on celluloid held in San Francisco. She currently serves as co-chair of the AMIA Small Gauge and Amateur Film Committee.
Andy Uhrich
Andy Uhrich is the Curator of Film and Media at the Washington University Libraries in St. Louis
Lorena Escala Vignolo
Lorena Escala Vignolo graduated with a BA in Audiovisual Communication from the University of Lima and holds a Master’s Degree in Film Preservation from Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola in San Sebastián, Spain. She has been working on an investigation on small gauge film in Peru, and participated in This Film is Dangerous, a project about the restoration of a nitrate print. She has been a research assistant and intern at the film magazine Ventana Indiscreta and a programmer at Armando Robles Godoy, the alternative movie theater managed by the Ministry of Culture in Perú. She has worked as part of a technical group reviewing applications of film projects at the Government’s Audiovisual Funding Contests. She manages the project www.cineamateurperuano.org
Patricia Ledesma Villon
Patricia Ledesma Villon is a graduate student at the MLIS/Media Archival Studies program at UCLA. She previously worked as a production archival assistant with the Center for Asian American Media for the recent PBS documentary The Asian Americans and is a co-programmer for Light Field, an international exhibition of recent and historical experimental moving image art on celluloid held in San Francisco. She currently serves as co-chair of the AMIA Small Gauge and Amateur Film Committee.
Todd Wiener
Todd Wiener has worked at the UCLA Film & Television Archive for more than twenty-one years and has served as its Motion Picture Archivist since 2005. In addition to supporting all motion picture-related academic, programmatic, and preservation programs at the Archive, Todd serves as one of the Film & Television Archive’s liaisons with major donors, depositors, and important archival preservation partners such as The Film Foundation, Film Noir Foundation, Outfest, and the Sundance Institute. He serves as an Advisory Board Member for the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project, Film Noir Foundation, and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.