Congratulations to A/CA members Almudena Escobar López, Laura Horak, and Michael Marlatt, who are presenting their research at the upcoming 2024 ASSOCIATION OF MOVING IMAGE ARCHIVISTS (AMIA) Conference being held December 4–6 in Milwaukee, WI. Details about individual presentations are posted below.
Visit the conference schedule on the AMIA website for more information.
FRIDAY | DECEMBER 6
2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
Author, Author! An AMIA Publishing Roundtable
Devin Orgeron, Deserted Films
Melissa Dollman, Deserted Films
Liza Palmer, The Moving Image/Film Matters
Brian Real, University of Kentucky
Karen Gracy, Kent State University
Anthony Silvestri, Minnesota Press
Michael Marlatt, Archival Accessibility Consultant
Jimi Jones, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Peter B. Kaufman, MIT
AMIA members are among the leading professional and scholarly voices worldwide on issues surrounding the preservation, archiving, and restoration of film, video, and digital moving images. They write not only for AMIA’s journal, The Moving Image, but also author books and articles for a wide variety of publications. This session offers a sneak peek at a few upcoming publications, with time for Q&A with the authors / editors. Have something you’re working on and want to figure out how to get it in the world? Curious about publishing? Want to make folks aware of something you’ve just published? Join us for a mostly informal chat. Let’s get our work out there!
3:15 PM – 3:45 PM
Artists and Archives: A Model for Community Engaged Archives at Visual Studies Workshop
Almudena Escobar Lopez, Toronto Metropolitan University
Tara Merenda Nelson, Visual Studies Workshop
How do collaborations between artists, community members and archives push forward archival methodologies and practices? This session will present strategies of curatorial and artistic modes of collaboration within the archive, using Visual Studies Workshop (VSW) as a case study. Artist/filmmaker and curator Tara Merenda Nelson and curator, scholar, and archivist, Almudena Escobar López will co-present on the central role of the archives within VSW’s public programming initiatives. Merenda Nelson will present on VSW’s Community Curator Program and the seasonal Salon series that directly connect members of the community with VSW archives, as well as the media transfer laboratory. Escobar López will discuss VSW’s artistic residencies and their use of archives as an example of archival intervention and inquiry.
5:00 PM – 5:30 PM
Insights from the Cinema’s First Nasty Women Audience Demographics Survey
Russell Zych, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Maggie Hennefeld, CFnw Project Director
Laura Horak, CFNW Project Director
Cinema’s First Nasty Women is a multi-part research, curation, and outreach project focused on expanding critical engagement with long-overlooked feminist films and filmmakers of the silent period. This session will present the results of the project’s most recent study: a demographics and attitudes survey of contemporary silent cinema audiences. The anonymous online survey was issued in spring of 2024, and received more than 3,000 responses. Survey questions covered basic demographic data, film viewing habits, exposure to silent cinema, familiarity with silent cinema organizations, and interest in feminist film scholarship. Presentation attendees can expect to come away with a more accurate understanding of the silent film community’s social profile in terms of gender, race, sexuality, age, and class. Analysis and discussion will explore practical takeaways for marketing, outreach, and advocacy decisions–but also raise questions about the purpose and impact of public programming.