AMIA 2026 | Keynote Speaker: Tony Buba

For more than 50 years, Tony Buba has made a single Pennsylvania mill town the subject of his life’s work. Since 1974, he has directed over 40 films, including four features, documenting working-class life in and around his hometown of Braddock, PA.

His career began with The Braddock Chronicles, a dozen short documentary portraits capturing the stubborn signs of life in a dying steel town. That commitment to Braddock carried through his feature Lightning Over Braddock and into his later work, which draws on home movies, family photographs, and community materials alongside original documentary footage. His Mon Valley Trilogy was purchased by the Carnegie Museum of Art and is part of its permanent collection.

Buba’s films have been the subject of one-person shows at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Anthology Film Archives, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and more than 100 other museums and universities. He has received fellowships from the NEA, AFI, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and his honors include the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award and Pennsylvania Media Artist of the Year.

Buba’s career is worth watching for more than the films themselves. He has spent five decades building, reusing, and recontextualizing his own footage, mixing new production with home movies and community-sourced material into a body of work that functions as a running archive of one place. That footage is now itself the object of institutional preservation and museum collection, giving him a working filmmaker’s perspective on a question archivists spend their careers on: what it takes to keep moving-image material alive, accessible, and meaningful over half a century.