Business

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the organization, this year’s Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) Annual Conference will feature four notable keynote speakers. The presentations will be given each day during AMIA’s online conference, November 17-20.

The 2020 keynote speakers are:

–The Film Foundation’s Margaret Bodde
–Indie Director icon Allison Anders
–Southern Folklife Collection’s Project Director and AV Conservator Erica Titkemeyer
–American trans woman multimedia artist, LGBT activist, actress, and TV producer Zackary Drucker

Tuesday, November 17. A conversation with Margaret Bodde, Executive Director of The Film Foundation since 1991, and Cecilia Cenciarelli, a director of the Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Bologna and in charge of research and special projects at the Cineteca di Bologna since 2000. The Film Foundation, celebrating its 30th anniversary, is dedicated to protecting and preserving motion picture history. By working in partnership with archives and studios, the foundation has helped to restore over 850 films, which are made accessible to the public through programming at festivals, museums, and educational institutions around the world. The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project has restored 42 films from 25 different countries representing the rich diversity of world cinema. The foundation’s free educational curriculum, The Story of Movies, teaches young people – over 10 million to date – about film language and history. In 2017, the African Film Heritage Project was launched to identify, preserve and disseminate 50 significant African films, working in partnership with the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI) and UNESCO. Margaret Bodde has also produced many of Scorsese’s documentary films, including Rolling Thunder Revue (2019), The 50 Year Argument (2014), George Harrison: Living in the Material World (2011), Public Speaking (2010), No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005), and the PBS series The Blues (2003). Prior to joining Scorsese, Bodde worked in marketing and distribution at Miramax Films and as a preservation officer at the Library of Congress.\

Wednesday, November 18. Allison Anders is a trailblazing, award-winning screenwriter and film and TV director whose work includes Gas Food Lodging, Mi Vida Loca, Grace Of My Heart and Things Behind The Sun. She’s directed countless episodes of TV which include Sex And The City, Orange Is The New Black, Southland, Murder In The First, Mayans, Riverdale, and The Affair. She was nominated for an Emmy for Best Director for the TV movie Ring Of Fire. She’s a MacArthur Fellow, a Peabody Award Winner and a Distinguished Professor of Film And Media at UC Santa Barbara. Anders will be in conversation with Maya Montañez Smukler who heads the UCLA Film & Television Archive Research and Study Center. Since 2015, she has conducted interviews for the Visual History Program at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science. Her recent book, Liberating Hollywood: Women Directors & the Feminist Reform of 1970s American Cinema, available from Rutgers University Press, was the 2018 recipient of the Theatre Library Association’s Richard Wall Memorial Award. Maya’s first real job was as assistant to director Allison Anders on the film Grace of My Heart.

Thursday, November 19. Since 2014, Erica Titkemeyer has been the Project Director and AV Conservator for the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH). In this position they coordinate a $1.75 million grant-funded initiative to preserve audiovisual materials for UNC-CH and partner institutions across the state of North Carolina. From 2013-2014 they were a Library of Congress National Digital Stewardship Resident at the Smithsonian Institution Archives, working to produce best practices and recommendations for museums collecting digital media artworks. Erica is also a consultant for Myriad Consulting and Training, specializing in AV preservation, grant writing, copyright, digital preservation, and digital technologies and tools. Their keynote address will be “Practicing gratitude while wanting more from the AV preservation field.”

Friday, November 20. Zackary Drucker is an independent artist, cultural producer, and trans woman who breaks down the way we think about gender, sexuality, and seeing. She has performed and exhibited her work internationally in museums, galleries, and film festivals including the Whitney Biennial 2014, MoMA PS1, Hammer Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, MCA San Diego, and SF MoMA, among others. Drucker is an Emmy-nominated Producer for the docu-series This Is Me, as well as a Producer on Golden Globe and Emmy-winning Transparent. She is currently directing The Lady and the Dale, on the life of Liz Carmichael, one of the first public figures outed as transgender, whose promotion of a three-wheeled car was either revolutionary or a giant con. It will appear on HBO in early 2021.

More than 650 professionals representing the world’s major media institutions gather each year for AMIA’s Annual Conference. Attendees represent all areas of the community-corporate and national archives, media companies, libraries, historical societies, service providers, universities, and more. Workshops, screenings, and more than 30 sessions programmed by working archivists address the best ways to preserve and provide access to our media.

For more information on the full program, or to register for the AMIA Annual Conference, visit www.amiaconference.net.