Coprogrammers

Louis Massiah (coprogrammer/project director) is a documentary filmmaker and the founder/director of Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia. His innovative approach to documentary filmmaking and community media have earned him numerous honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship (1996-2001), two Rockefeller/Tribeca fellowships and a Pew Fellowship
in the Arts. His award-winning documentaries, The Bombing of Osage Avenue (1986), W.E.B. Du Bois – A Biography in in Four Voices (1996), two films for the Eyes on the Prize II series (1987), and A is for Anarchist, B is for Brown (2002), have been broadcast on PBS and screened at festivals and museums throughout the US, Europe, and Africa. In 2011, he was commissioned to create a five-channel permanent video installation for the National Park Service’s President’s House historic site. Massiah has served as guest artist and visiting faculty member at Swarthmore College, Temple University, Princeton University, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Patricia R. Zimmermann (coprogrammer, researcher, writer) is Professor of Screen Studies at Ithaca College and co-director of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. She is author of Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film; States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies; Thinking Through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places (with Dale Hudson); Open Spaces: Openings, Closings, and Thresholds of International Public Media; The Flaherty: Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema (with Scott MacDonald); Open Space New Media Documentary: A Toolkit for Theory and Practice (with Helen De Michiel), and Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics. She is co-editor (with Karen Ishizuka) of Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories. A media historian and theorist, she specializes in documentary, new media, film/media/new media history, amateur film and emerging amateur technologies, and histories of the international public media arts.

Archivists

XFR Collective is a non-profit organization that partners with activists, artists, groups, and individuals to provide low-cost digitization services in order to preserve at-risk audiovisual media. They also aim to foster a community of support for archiving and access through cultural engagement, education, and research. The collective is particularly interested in media work that is unseen, unheard, or marginalized. Members contributing to the research and archival work for We Tell: Fifty Years of Participatory Community Media national touring exhibition include Brendan Allen, Carmel Curtis, Caroline Gil, Michael Grant, Marie Lascu, Treva Walsh.

Brendan Allen (researcher/archivist) 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. In 1998, he worked as a video librarian for Black Entertainment Television, then moved to the Public Broadcasting Service in Alexandria, VA, where he worked as the library media coordinator. In 2006, Brendan earned a Masters Degree 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.

Carmel Curtis (researcher/archivist) is a moving image archivist and curator. Over the past decade, she has been committed to increasing access to film and video by supporting screenings of diverse media to diverse audiences. She currently works in the Moving Image Archive of Indiana University. She is a board member of the nonprofit Screen Slate, a daily resource for New York City independent, repertory, and gallery screenings. She has worked with the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Deluxe, Dirty Looks, Human Rights Watch, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, Lincoln Center Archive, New York University, Planned Parenthood, and the United Nations. She is a proud member of the XFR Collective.

Caroline Gil (researcher/archivist) is a media archivist working with artists, cultural heritage institutions, nonprofits, and private art collectors. She has worked at Allied Productions, Filmoteca Cataluña, the New Art Trust, New York Public Library, the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklore and Cultural Heritage, Third World Newsreel, and with media artists’ personal collections. She has interests in experimental filmmakers, Latin American video art, media collectives, and low-cost solutions for digital preservation. She was the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Media Conservation at the Museum of Modern Art. She has a Master of Arts in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) from New York University and a Director of Cinematography Master of Arts from Universidad de Barcelona-ESCAC.

Michael Grant (researcher/archivist) is an archivist and video preservationist. Michael works for New York University Libraries and the Standby Program, as well as with XFR Collective. He has done work for the Educational Video Center, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, the New Netherland Institute, and the New York State Archives. His passions in archiving and preservation focus on helping people to recover their histories and to reclaim works from the no-longer-accessible analog tape carriers. By making visible personal and independent works otherwise unknown and inaccessible, his archival work is dedicated to helping to expand the historical canons of the audiovisual.

Marie Lascu (researcher/archivist) Marie Lascu is an independent media archivist who works with individuals managing their own collections and with organizations such as Third World Newsreel and Community Archiving Collective (CAC). She is also the Audiovisual Archivist for Crowing Rooster Arts, a nonprofit that has spent twenty years documenting the arts and political struggles of Haiti. She is the Digital Archivist for Ballet Tech, the NYC Public School for Dance. Marie has a Master of Arts in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) from New York University, and received the Society of American Archivists Spotlight Award in 2016.

Treva Walsh (researcher/archivist) is the Collections Project Manager at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, where she cares for the museum’s collection of Holocaust survivor oral history interviews and manages other collections, exhibitions, and research-related projects. She has led the archival processing team at The HistoryMakers, an African American video oral history archive in Chicago. Her team was responsible for cataloging and indexing over 1200 interviews and conducting biographical research in preparation for many more. She has been a Fellow in Media Conservation at the Museum of Modern Art.

Research Assistant

Jason Livingston (research assistant) is a filmmaker, programmer, and writer. He has worked with Cornell Cinema, the Experimental TV Center, the Standby Program, and others. His films have screened at many festivals, including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Anthology Film Archives, the Austrian Museum, the Vancouver Art Gallery. The Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre distributes his film Under Foot & Overstory and Electronic Arts Intermix distributes Lake Affect. He serves on the Flaherty Seminar’s Board of Trustees. He is pursuing a practice-based Ph.D. with the Department of Media Study at the University at Buffalo, New York.