Spring 2025 MIAP Newsletter

GREETINGS FROM MIAP

As we approach the end of spring and beginning of summer amidst these very challenging times, we invite you to take a moment to celebrate the activities and achievements of the MIAP community, and to share news from the program. Congratulations to everyone on your contributions to the profession and the program!

We also want to take a moment to thank Dean Allyson Green for all of her support to MIAP during her tenure as Dean of Tisch School of the Arts at NYU.

As always, if there are omissions or errors in the information, please email us to let us know. To share your Kudos for the Fall 2025 newsletter, please complete this form.

MIAP THESIS WEEK 2025

Spring and Summer 2025 MIAP graduates presented their work-in-progress theses during the annual MIAP Thesis Week in March, and one in April. Join us in congratulating them for their innovative contributions to the field and profession! Tremendous thank you to their thesis supervisors for their mentorship in bringing these projects to fruition. (These titles and abstracts below reflect the information at the time of the thesis presentations; updates will be shared in Fall 2025, at which time many will also be available to read on MIAP’s digital archive):

SPRING 2025 MIAP INTERNSHIPS

MIAP students completed their spring internships at the following sites. Read the summaries of spring internships (and more) here. Congratulations to the students, and enormous thank you to the internship supervisors and sites for their mentorship and partnership.

WELCOME PROFESSOR SHAWN VANCOUR

On behalf of Department Chair, Dana Polan, we are delighted to announce that Shawn VanCour will be joining the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies as Cinema Studies/MIAP Assistant Professor in Fall 2025. Read more here.

DPOE-N GRANT ANNOUNCEMENT

The Mellon Foundation has generously awarded $1.28 million to support the next cycle of the Digital Preservation Outreach and Education Network (DPOE-N), led by the Pratt Institute School of Information in collaboration with NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) program. This grant extends the project for another four-year cycle. Read more here.

UPDATE ON PRESERVATION OF JACKI OCHS’ LETTERS NOT ABOUT LOVE

Following the award to MIAP of a National Film Preservation Foundation Matching Grant, proposed under the guidance of MIAP professor Bill Brand following the initial development of the proposal by then MIAP student Sixuan (Momo) Li (‘24), preservation of Letters Not About Love (Jacki Ochs, 1998) is well underway. The original A&B rolls for the film have been scanned, and Bill Brand and Jacki Ochs are working on revising the preliminary color grade. The mix master sound track has been digitized, and subtitles are being prepared for closed captions and will soon be added to the Resolve timeline for export with the digital versions of the film. Students in MIAP’s Spring 2025 Film Preservation course have engaged with the preservation process by inspecting the original film A&B rolls and seen the scans assembled in DaVinci Resolve.

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.

KUDOS

Carlos Abarca (‘25) and Lucy Talbot Allen (‘25) curated the program Queer Visions: Treasures From the Nonfiction Avant-Garde in May as part of the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies’ Friday Night Event Series.

Becca Bender (‘18) published an op-ed in the Boston Globe, titled “With our history under attack, it’s time to preserve R.I.’s local newscasting”, calling for the creation of a Rhode Island Audiovisual Local News Archive

Bill Brand (MIAP Adjunct Faculty) exhibited recent plein air paintings in the group exhibition "Accouchement" / "Birthing" at Galerie Arnaud Lefevbre in Paris.

Jasmyn Castro (‘15) published the article “A License to Project: Black Female Projectionists and ‘Men’s Work’ in the US Women’s Army Corps” in the Spring 2025 issue of Feminist Media Histories.

Martha Diaz (‘16) was interviewed for Hip-Hop Archives: The Politics and Poetics of Knowledge Production by Mark V. Campbell and Murray Forman, a book that explores the cultural and political dynamics of building Hip-Hop archives. She is also collaborating with Wendy Levy from The Alliance for Media Arts + Culture to launch the first Digital Archiving Apprenticeship program, supported by funding from the California Opportunity Youth Apprenticeship grant.

A film produced by Brittan Dunham (‘11), Pee-wee as Himself, premiered at Sundance. Ashley Swinnerton ('11) was the Archival Researcher and Lauren Sorenson ('07) was a project manager, working with Paul Rubens' archive while we were in production. The film is made up of mostly material from Paul Ruben’s archive.

Sandra Gibson (‘10) and partner Luis Recoder (Gibson + Recorder), performed The Changeover System in January at the National Gallery of Art. Their film Corner Film, showed in France in February as part of the Festival International de Vidéo Danse de Bourgogne. They also exhibited Five Miles of VHS Tape at FiveMyles exhibition and performance space in Brooklyn in April - May.

Sarah Hartzell (‘22) presented at the Cinema Revival Festival at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, where she shared a small selection of the thousands of AV items they’ve worked on in the last two years. Highlights include original nitrate footage of an Antarctic expedition from the 1930s, Alan Shepard's landing after his historic trip to outer space, and the debut of an NFPF-funded restoration of "Elijah Pierce: Woodcarver," about a Columbus-based folk artist who achieved international acclaim.

Marina Hassapopoulou (acting MIAP Director) presented her paper “The Ephemera of Interactive Cinema” during the “Interactive Narratives: Rethinking Interactivity and Digital Archiving” seminar at the American Comparative Literature Association 2025 Annual Conference. She will also be contributing a book chapter to discuss her new experimental archiving project with Erik Loyer, titled: "The Ephemera of Early Digital Interactive Cinema: New Materially- and Practically-Informed Approaches to the Study of Transient Interactive Media," in the forthcoming anthology, Interactive Narratives—The Evolution of Storytelling in the Digital Age (2026).

Jenny Hsu (‘24) presented “The ‘Artwork Audit’: Conservation of Time-Based Media Artworks Post-Acquisition” at the Research Out Loud: Met Fellows Present at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in May.

Shiyang Jiang (‘21) published the article “Metadata and the Media Ecology Project” in Volume 7, Issue 1 (2024) of The Journal of E-Media Studies

Andrew Lampert (MIAP Adjunct Faculty), in collaboration with Christine Burgin, launched the first five titles of The Further Reading Library, “an ongoing series of books dedicated to forgotten ideas, overlooked accomplishments, and idiosyncratic world views.” Lampert also programmed the series His Head Was A Sledgehammer: Richard Foreman in Retrospect at Anthology Film Archives in May.

Kristin MacDonough (‘13) interviewed video artist Wendy Clarke and programmed a selection of excerpts from her ongoing project, Love Tapes for Video Data Bank's VDB TV platform. The interview is available to read alongside the program.

Kirk Mudle (‘23) published an article based on his MIAP thesis "A Gift to Another Age: Evaluating Virtual Machines for the Preservation of Video Games at MoMA” in the Journal of Digital Media Management

Yvonne Ng (‘08) was awarded the Alan Stark Award from the Association of Moving Image Archivists.

Syrina Nuemah (‘25) participated in the “Experimental Colour Practices” panel at the Eye International Conference 2025: Colour Fantastic Revisited, presenting her MIAP thesis research From Early to Direct Cinema: An Interdisciplinary Study on the Conservation of Hand-Painted Film.

Carlos Saldaña (‘24) became the 2025 Film Conservation Fellow at the Centre de Conservació i Restauració, Filmoteca de Catalunya. He also edited Frans van de Staak: The Word as Archipelago, the first monograph on the Dutch filmmaker Staak, published by Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival of Navarra. He programmed the 16mm film screening and lecture Jocs d'aigua in Girona (El Modern), and the 16mm film screenings The Devil Has Struck Us with the Staff of Evil. The Cinema of George Kuchar and A Man Playing Movie. An Anthology of Japanese Avant-Garde Cinema. Along with Pablo Eguía and Francis Schichtel, he photographed the 16mm film You Never Did Anything Wrong (Nan Goldin, 2024), which premiered at Gagosian Gallery in September.

Dan Streible (MIAP Associate Director) published the essay “Seeing through the Haverstraw Tunnel” in Volume 7, Issue 1 (2024) of The Journal of E-Media Studies. Streible’s essay “The Orphan Film Symposium at 25” was also published in issue #111 of the FIAF journal.

Juana Suárez (MIAP Director), served as Juror of the Official Competition of the 40th Guadalajara International Film Festival in June. Suárez's essay "Film Preservation, Archives and Film Festivals in Latin America" was published in Shaping Film Festivals in a Changing World. Suárez also delivered the fall 2024 Kaufman Masterclass at the Department of Film and Media Studies at Amherst College on Digital Preservation of Personal Content. With the support of Amherst College colleagues at the Department of Spanish, she also workshopped with high school students on community archiving aimed at safeguarding materials from the Pa’lante Transformative Justice Center at Holyoke.  

Kimberly Tarr (‘09, MIAP Associate Director) co-presented “Making the Anonymous Known: Collaborating to Amplify the History of Amateur Cinema in Greece” at the Amateur Cinema: a Global History at the Filmoteca de Catalunya conference in Barcelona, Spain.

Andy Uhrich (‘10) has joined the Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder as Assistant Professor of Moving-Image Archiving.

MIAP 20TH ANNIVERSARY + ONGOING PARTNERSHIPS

MIAP welcomes ideas from current students, alumni, and former/current faculty for celebrations for our 20th Anniversary. Email [email protected].

We also invite partnerships for Spring, Summer, and Fall (2026) 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 summer!