Fall 2024 MIAP Newsletter

GREETINGS FROM MIAP!

We are excited to launch this new newsletter format, which we will use to share Kudos from our community alongside MIAP-related news. Thank you for your patience as we developed this new format. We hope to send this newsletter twice yearly, in Fall and Spring; we beg your patience if the busy schedule of MIAP ever pushes delays.

Congratulations to everyone on your contributions to the profession and the program, as reflected in this new MIAP Newsletter. As always, if there are omissions or errors in the information, please email us to let us know. To share your Kudos for the next newsletter, please complete this form.

Cheers,
Juana Suárez, MIAP Director and Niki Korth, MIAP Academic Program Manager

UPCOMING EVENTS

If you are in NYC, join us at these upcoming events this month!

Home Movie Day 2024
Saturday, October 19, 12:00 - 4:00 pm
Queens Public Library, 20-12 Madison Street, Ridgewood, NY

Bring your 8mm, 16mm, VHS, Hi-8 and miniDV home movies, enjoy an afternoon of discoveries, and learn about best preservation practices. This is a day to preserve, share, and screen your local history.

This event is organized by the NYU AMIA Student Chapter in partnership with the Queens Memory Project, and XFR Collective.

MIAP Archiving Screening Night
Friday, October 25, 6:00 - 8:00 pm
Michelson Theater, 721 Broadway, 6th Floor, New York, NY
RSVP Here

MIAP 20th anniversary celebrations are planned for Fall 2025. The program wants to anticipate the occasion by inviting alumni to showcase restorations and preservation projects that include their work or leadership. This screening night follows the steps of our beloved AMIA Archival Screening Night to bring that community event energy to the larger NYU community!

This program is brought to you by Carlos Saldaña (’24) and Juana Suárez (’13). A reception will follow after the screening. Please join us and reconnect with former classmates and colleagues!

Cinema Studies Alumni Panel
Saturday October 26, 2:00 - 4:00 pm
Michelson Theater, 721 Broadway, 6th Floor, New York, NY
RSVP Here

Join our fabulous and talented panel of BA, MA, and MIAP alumni to talk about their career paths since completing the program! Light bites will be served following the panel.

MIAP AWARDED MATCHING GRANT FROM NFPF FOR PRESERVATION OF LETTERS NOT ABOUT LOVE

The National Film Preservation Foundation awarded a Matching Grant to MIAP for preservation of Letters Not About Love (Jacki Ochs, 1998), proposed under the guidance of MIAP professor Bill Brand.

In Spring 2024, MIAP student Sixuan (Momo) Li (‘24) began developing the proposal for the grant as a class assignment in Brand’s Film Preservation course. Brand and his students will work on part of the project in his Spring 2025 Film Preservation course.

Produced by the Human Arts Association, Jacki Ochs’s Letters Not About Love is a 58-minute, 16mm, experimental documentary with a unique collaborative structure that records five years of correspondence (1988-1993) between American poet Lyn Hejinian and Ukrainian poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko. More information on this project will be shared in the next MIAP newsletter.

CURRENT MIAP CLASS UPDATES

We are delighted to welcome nine new students this Fall for the MIAP class of 2026! Read their bios, and the continuing students’ bios, here.

Continuing MIAP students completed internships in Spring and Summer 2024 and are completing Fall 2024 internships at the following sites. Read their internship summaries here. Several of these internships were/are being supervised by MIAP alumni, including Oscar Becher (‘23), Jasmyn Castro (‘15), Shahed Dowlatshahi (‘18), Michael Grant (‘15), Kelly Haydon (‘14), Marie Lascu (‘12), Lindsay Miller (‘22), Kirk Mudle (‘22), Peter Oleksik (‘09), Michael Stetz (‘22), Benjamin Turkus (‘16), and Pamela Vadakan (‘05).

2024 MIAP THESIS WEEK

Congratulations to the MIAP class of 2024, who presented their work-in-progress theses last March during the MIAP Thesis Week. We express our gratitude to their thesis supervisors for their support and mentorship.

Join us in applauding these innovative contributions to the field and profession! Many of these theses are now published on the MIAP website here. (For the record, the titles listed below are the final thesis titles, some of which were modified since they were presented during Thesis Week).

APEX 2024

MIAP and the Archipelago Network hosted the 2024 Audiovisual Preservation Exchange (APEX) in Greece May 22-31, 2024. MIAP students and select archivists joined Athens and Syros participants to preserve the “Of the Anonymous” archive and the Aigaio Radio & TV station archive.

The “Of the Anonymous” collection includes Super 8 and 16mm films of Greek and international amateur cinema. Aigaio Radio & TV, a public-access station established in 1988, holds thousands of regional TV and radio broadcasts. Participants partially digitized this collection, and improved cataloging methods and accessibility for both archives. Public programming, including workshops and screenings, was also held in Syros, Greece in the context of the 2nd Documenting Heritage Festival and in collaboration with the Syros International Film Festival.

APEX 2024 was organized by MIAP Director Juana Suárez. Special thanks to Mona Jimenez (MIAP Associate Director and Associate Arts Professor 2003-2017) and Kim Tarr (‘09, MIAP Visiting Assistant Professor) for taking over leadership in Greece; shout out to Shahed Dowlatshahi (‘18) and Clara Sánchez, Coordinator of the Archival Program at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, for their support and mentoring of participating students and locals. The following current MIAP students and recent graduates participated: Neil Brydon (‘25), Julia Delgadillo (‘25), Fin Hatfield (‘24), Charlie Norbury (‘25), Syriana Nuemah (‘25), Juliana Principe Salazar (‘25), and Matthew Yang (‘24).

Special thanks to “Of the Anonymous” – Amateur Audiovisual Material Archive, Aigaio Radio & TV, AVP, Urbanski, Image Permanence Institute, and the Municipality of Syros-Ermoupolis.

ORPHAN FILM SYMPOSIUM: REPORT

The 2024 Orphan Film Symposium “Work & Play” took place in April 2024 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, NY. The symposium included over fifty presenters from over fifteen countries, with screen content ranging from new productions to archival material from more than a century. The event was covered in depth by IndieWire, and also photographed in black-and-white negative film (Kodak T-Max 400, 35mm roll) by Julita (Juju) Pratiwi (‘24) & Sixuan (Momo) Li (‘24).

In early 2024, leading up to the symposium in April, the Orphan Film Symposium co-hosted a well-attended and well-received program at the Museum of Modern Art: "Orphans at Moma: Sixteen Tons—Working with 16mm.” MIAP Faculty Bill Brand, Dan Streible, and Kim Tarr introduced screenings. This marked the eighth year "Orphans at MoMA" has been part of the annual To Save and Project: MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation.  

The next Orphan Film Symposium is expected to take place in April 2026.

KUDOS

Special shout out to MIAP ‘24 grads who were awarded the following fellowships! Jenny Hsu: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Conservation Fellow in time-based media at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; José Solé: David Booth Fellowship in Media Conservation at the Museum of Modern Art; and Matthew Yang: Getty Graduate Internship at The J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles.

Ina Archer (former MIAP student) served as series consultant for the 18-film repertory series: Oscar Micheaux and the Birth of Black Independent Cinema, which ran in May 2024 at Film Forum. 

Bill Brand (MIAP Adjunct Faculty) presented Hessie, Survival Trance, a poetic film about the French performance artist Hessie made in 1974 by Mythia Kolesar-Dewasne, which Brand and Arnaud Lefebvre worked together to restore. This screening took place at Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre in Paris as part of a group exhibition of five women artists: Hessie, Katy Martin, Judith Nelson, Diana Quinby, and Olga Theuriet. 

Jennifer Blaylock (‘10) published an article "Audiovisual Artefacts: the African Politics of Moving Image Loss" in the South African journal Social Dynamics in March 2024. This article is part of a special issue based on presentations made at the conference "After the Fire: Loss, Archive and African Studies," held one year after the Jagger Reading Room fire that destroyed many of the African Studies collections at the University of Cape Town. The article considers loss within the context of Ghanaian moving image collections. 

Martha Diaz (‘16) was awarded a Catalyst Grant from the Society of American Archivists Foundation for the Fresh, Bold & So Def (FBSD) Women in Hip-Hop Digital Archives Project. Led by Diaz, Hip Hop Education Center (HHEC) founder and executive director, this announcement follows a successful FBSD symposium at Lincoln Center in April 2024, where HHEC received a proclamation from NYC Commissioner of Cultural Affairs Laurie Cumbo declaring the date as a Women in Hip-Hop Day. Earlier this year, Diaz was elected to serve a three-year term as Member-at-Large for the Independent Archivist Steering Committee at the Society of American Archivists.

Rebecca Fraimow (‘13), and Lorena Ramírez-López (‘15) received the 2023 Ray Edmondson Advocacy Award from AMIA, together with Fraimow’s PBCore Translating Team. Fraimow also facilitated the PBCore workshop at the 2023 AMIA conference.

Walter Forsberg (‘10) co-edited "Cine-Espacios," an anthology on Mexican microcinema culture and histories, published by Canyon Cinema.

Jonathan Farbowitz (‘16) was featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s podcast “Immaterial” in their episode about time-based media conservation. Farbowitz was also featured in the Met’s Department of Photograph Conservation July Bulletin regarding his work in the conservation examination of Nam June Paik’s Chinese Memory, a work recently acquired by the Met. In July 2024, his position as Associate Conservator of Time-Based Media was made permanent.

Ethan Gates (‘15) and Claire Fox (‘20) led a free online workshop titled “An Introduction to Software Preservation and Emulation” for the DPOE-N network in May 2024. This event featured simultaneous interpretation from English to Spanish.

Joseph Gallucci (‘10) started a new position in January at UCLA Library Special Collections - Project Manager, Audiovisual Survey. Gallucci will be leading a team of current UCLA students in the completion of a survey of all the A/V holdings of UCLA LSC.

Syreeta Gates (‘20) participated in the Hemispheric Institute’s launch event for “We Not New To This, We True To This,” described by the Hemispheric Institute as “a multi-year initiative that seeks to center, preserve, and celebrate the work of the Black archivists, memory workers, and artists who have been diligent stewards and keepers of the culture for decades.”

Sandra Gibson ('10) and partner Luis Recoder (Gibson + Recoder) presented a three-day workshop "Cinema from Scratch: From Camera Obscura to Handmade Film" at Hambidge Center in Rabun Gap, Georgia in September 2024. 

Gibson and Recoder, in collaboration with Cinema Studies alum Greg Zinman, also showed new video work created on the Sandin Video Synthesizer and the Dave Jones Image Processor at 725 Ponce in early October 2024 as part of Zinman’s screening series “Off the Wall.” In conjunction with this screening, Gibson + Recoder gave an artist talk at Emory University. Read more in the press release here.

In May, Gibson + Recoder were invited by Walter Forsberg to lead a two-day workshop titled "Artists Film Projection Workshop" at the Smithsonian as part of the Federal Projection Society.

Joey Heinen (‘14) hosted "TBM IRL: Examining Life Cycles of Time-Based Media Art", a day-long colloquium gathering Southern California artists, galleries, collectors, museums, and archives/estates to consider our shared roles in stewarding time-based artworks. The event took place at the Academy Museum on behalf of LACMA.

Jenny Hsu ('24) was featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Photograph Conservation’s September Bulletin.

Shiyang Jiang (‘21) started a position as a film preservationist in the film restoration department at China Film Archive. 

Adrianne Lundy ('24) accepted a position as Archival Collection Assessment Coordinator at the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Working under the direction of the Film and Television Archive Motion Picture Curator, Lundy is responsible for organizing historical documentation held at the Archive and coordinating efforts to normalize current and past agreements with the eventual goal of clarifying potential access opportunities.

Madeleine Mendell (’21) served as archival producer for the film Protect Me From What I Want (Ed Lachman, 2024), which showed as part of the Guggenheim’s Jenny Holzer: Light Line exhibition, May-September, 2024. Mendell helped locate the original 16mm workprint and audio (half of the negatives were recovered separately) and led the preservation and scanning for the original film and audio.

CK Ming (‘11) received the 2023 William S. O’Farrell Volunteer Award from AMIA.

Kirk Mudle (‘23) wrote an essay on the 2023 Nigerian film Mami Wata, which will be included with Dekanalog's Blu-ray release of the title in July. Mudle also co-authored “What Needs to be Learned by U.S. Cultural Heritage Professionals? Results from the Digital Preservation Outreach & Education Network”, which was published in the Preservation, Digital Technology & Culture journal.

Yvonne Ng (‘08) spoke  at the Archivist’s Round Table event “Supporting Community-Based Video Archiving for Human Rights with WITNESS”. Ng was also interviewed in the Summer 2024 edition of the Metropolitan Archivist.

Bono Olgado (‘12) and Yvonne Ng (‘08) participated in webinar “Fight the Power(s): Audiovisual Archiving for Social Justice”, hosted by the International Council on Archives.

Juliana Principe Salazar (‘25) was awarded an NYU CLACS Tinker Field Research Grant in summer 2024 for her thesis project related to Peruvian Audiovisual Archives.

Andrew Reichel (‘24) hosted “Declarative Comparisons: Two by Paul Sharits” at the Film-makers’ Cooperative. Two rarely shown Sharits films, Epileptic Seizure Comparison and Declarative Mode, were screened on 16mm. He also hosted “An Afternoon with Larry Gottheim” at NYPL Performing Arts. 

Carlos Saldaña (‘24) co-published, co-edited, and translated the book Illuminated Hours: The Early Cinema of Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler. Coinciding with this publication, Saldaña organized a series at MoMA and another at Anthology Film Archives that showcased a wide-ranging selection of works by the two filmmakers, tracing their shared lives of creative exchanges and including North American and world premieres.

Carlos Saldaña, (’24), and Juana Suárez, MIAP Director, led a DIY workshop at Cinemateca de Bogotá on optical media preservation, a project supported by the Vulnerable Media Lab (Queen’s University), Cinemateca de Bogotá, and NYU MIAP APEX, which supported preservation efforts by local communities including 600 screeners for the Cine en Femenino Film Festival, the most important festival to showcase work by Colombian women filmmakers in the last 15 years; a collection of materials related to environmentalist records in Colombia; a collection of materials from artist Juan Manuel Echavarría that document art actions related to peace and reconciliation in the interior of the Atlantic Coast of Colombia, and the various collections at Cinemateca that are kept in CD and DVD. Before the in situ workshops, Pamela Vízner (‘14) did an online workshop on Digital Preservation, preceded by one on Collection Management by Juana Suárez.

Cinemateca do Bogotá also hosted a conversation with Saldaña, Suárez and Colombian film critic Pedro Adrián Zuluaga on the nuances of programming experimental cinema: “Parpadeante, Excéntrico e Infinito: en torno a la programación de cine experimental”.

Leah Simon (‘26) wrote a review of the New York Historical Society's "Women's Work" exhibition for the Winter 2024 issue of the Metropolitan Archivist, titled “The History of Women’s Work Starts and Continues with the Labor Movement.” Simon also presented “A Guard Tower Throws a Long Afternoon Shadow” at the Spring 2024 Cinema and Media Studies Graduate Conference "Mediating Experience, Experiencing Mediation" at the University of Washington. In April 2024, she also organized an event at Woodbine community art space in Ridgewood, Queens which included a screening of Eyal Sivan’s feature film Izkor: Slaves of Memory (1991), and Noémie Hakim-Serfaty’s short film אחותי - My Sister (2019), alongside a discussion of Ella Shohat's essay "The Invention of the Mizrahim." 

Juana Suárez (‘13), MIAP Director, has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. She was an invited researcher to the artistic residence Sharing Places at AADK Spain, Centro Negra-Espacio de Investigación y Creación Contemporánea, Murcia (Spain) in October 2024. This residence unfolds from collaborations in APEX 2017 in Cartagena (Spain). She presented Experimental Extremo, a 16mm project with Cuban photographer Juan Carlos Alom and a group of Cuban artists in the diaspora. Suárez and José Solé (‘24) are currently serving as advisors to the project.

Suárez was also a scholar in residence for MECILA and the CEBRAP in São Paulo, Brazil in September 2024. She facilitated workshops on working with communities and artists and delivered the keynote address for the Corpo Arquivo: Práticas, Memórias e Imaginações conference. She also lectured at Universidad de Guadalajara (Mexico), Departamento de Imagen y Sonido in February 2024, at Universidad de Granada (Spain), Departamento de Información y Comunicación in September 2024, presented at SCMS in March 2024, and received a Dean’s Grant for the MIAP Curriculum Assessment. 

Madeline Smith (‘20) started a new position at the Whitney Museum of American Art as the Manager of Time-Based Media Acquisitions and Permanent Collection Information.

Kim Tarr (‘09), MIAP Associate Director, presented “Praxis and Partnership: How Archival Training Programs Support the Audiovisual Archiving Field” at the 2024 International Audiovisual and Sound Archives (IASA) conference in Valencia, Spain.

Matthew Yang (‘24) was awarded the 2023 AMIA Broadening Perspectives Scholarship.

Jacob Zaborowski (‘17) co-guest lectured on metadata for digital preservation to MLS students in a Metadata class at the University of Missouri iSchool. Zaborowski also completed certification in Digital Asset Management from Rutgers University in February 2023. This six-month program focused on training in the various aspects of the DAM ecosystem, including metadata, rights management, and implementation.

Katie Zwick (‘23) programmed the shorts section of the 53rd New Directors / New Films at Film at Lincoln Center with a counterpart from the Museum of Modern Art.

MIAP 20TH ANNIVERSARY + ONGOING PARTNERSHIPS

MIAP welcomes ideas from current students, alumni, and former/current faculty for celebrations for our 20th Anniversary. Most activities will take place in Fall 2025. Email [email protected].

We also invite partnerships for Fall, Spring, and Summer internships, and leads on institutions, artists, and collectors needing support with collection assessments. Collection Assessments are conducted by students in the Spring Collection Management class and are supervised by the corresponding instructor of the course. We work with analog and digital collections. Email Niki Korth if you wish to receive information on the current process of internships and collection assessments.

Wishing everyone a great end of the semester!

IMAGE CREDITS (top to bottom):

1.) Still from a Home Movie from a current MIAP student (text added). Used with permission. 2.) Working at the Aigaio Radio & TV station archive in Syros (Greece). Photo by Charlie Norbury. 3.) Left to right: Jenny Hsu at Video Data Bank during Summer 2023 internship, Matthew Yang at New York Public Library during Spring 2023 internship, José Solé at Bay Area Video Coalition during Summer 2023 internship. 4.) “Matinee” by Azucena Losana (2021). Published in "Cine-Espacios". 5.) “Outline,” 35mm hand-painted film (2003). Courtesy of Gibson + Recoder. 6.) Left to right: Luis Recoder, Ina Archer, Sandra Gibson, Walter Forsberg, Emily Francisco, and Blake McDowell during the Artists Film Projection Workshop. Photo courtesy of Walter Forsberg. 7.) Participants in the Optical Media Preservation Workshop, Cinemateca de Bogotá, November 2023. Photo by Cinemateca de Bogotá. 8.) José Solé working with Juan Carlos Alom in Experimental Extremo. Photo by Juana Suárez.