Rochelle Slovin
Rochelle Slovin is the founding Director of the Museum of the Moving Image. Under her leadership, the Museum has become one of the most important and admired institutions of its kind in the world. Ms. Slovin joined the then recently formed Astoria Motion Picture and Television Foundation as Executive Director in 1981. The Foundation was responsible for re-opening the historic Astoria Studios for feature film production. Ms. Slovin took on the mission of setting policy for the Foundation and determining a proper use for its city-owned property. She proposed creating a Museum of the Moving Image, going on to develop plans for its building, exhibitions, and programs; raise the funds necessary for its construction and operation; and assemble a distinguished staff and Board of Trustees. She has directed the Museum since its opening in September 1988.

With Ms. Slovin at the helm, the Museum has become renowned as the only museum in the United States devoted exclusively to film, television, and digital media. It houses a collection of more than 100,000 objects, one of the largest such collections ever assembled. The Museum is a major New York City attraction, drawing thousands of adults and children each year to its screenings, education programs, and innovative exhibitions of moving image-related artifacts and interactive experiences. Ms. Slovin has overseen the expansion of the Museum’s reach through offsite programs, traveling exhibitions, and a content-rich website. She has been the producer of the Museum’s gala Salute at the Waldorf-Astoria since 1985, and the co-executive producer of the television broadcast of the Salute, which honored Will Smith last year, on Bravo.

In 1992, Ms. Slovin received the City of New York Mayor’s Award of Honor for Arts and Culture from Mayor David Dinkins for “her leadership of an internationally recognized institution.” The Metropolitan Historic Structures Association honored her in 1993 for “her inspired leadership in the founding of the Museum of the Moving Image, a site of national and international cultural significance.” In 2002, Ms. Slovin and the Museum were honored by Governor George Pataki with the New York Governor’s Arts Award.

David Schwartz
David Schwartz is the Chief Curator at the Museum of the Moving Image, where he has worked since 1985. He is responsible for the Museum’s wide-ranging film programs, and received a Film Heritage Award in 2006 from the National Society of Film Critics for organizing the first complete U.S. retrospective of the filmmaker Jacques Rivette. He is the main moderator for the Museum’s Pinewood Dialogues, a series of conversations with prominent directors and actors, and is the co-curator of the Museum’s popular online exhibition The Living Room Candidate: A History of Presidential Campaign Commercials. He is a lecturer in the Cinema Studies program at Purchase College.

Dennis Lim
Dennis Lim is the Editorial Director at the Museum of the Moving Image and the editor of the Museum’s new website Moving Image Source, which will launch in June 2008. He is a regular contributor to The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, a contributing editor to the film quarterly Cinema Scope, and a member of the adjunct faculty at New York University’s Department of Journalism. Formerly the film editor of the Village Voice, he is a member of the National Society of Film Critics and the editor of the Village Voice Film Guide (2006). He is currently working on a book about the filmmaker David Lynch for John Wiley & Sons.

Michael Barker
Michael Barker is Co-President of Sony Pictures Classics, an autonomous company of Sony Pictures Entertainment founded in January 1992 that produces, acquires, and distributes independent films from America and around the world. He has worked with many of the world’s finest independent filmmakers, including Akira Kurosawa, Louis Malle, Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, Pedro Almodóvar, Mike Figgis, Woody Allen, François Truffaut, Sally Potter, David Cronenberg, Hector Babenco, Guillermo del Toro, Robert Altman, and Ingmar Bergman. Honors bestowed on his team and their films include 23 Academy Awards and 90 Academy Award nominations including three for Best Picture (Howards End; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Capote) as well as nine Opening Night Presentations at the New York Film Festival. At the Sony Global Management assembly, he, along with his partners, received the distinguished Special Recognition Award two years in a row for their continued success and achievement. He serves on the Entertainment Media and Technology Dean’s Advisory Board at NYU’s Stern School of Business and is a member of the Visiting Committee to the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He is also a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and has a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Texas. He was born in Nuremberg, Germany.

Heather Chaplin
Heather Chaplin is the author of Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution (Algonquin Books 2005) , a narratively told exploration of the modern videogame industry. The book was a New York Times editor’s pick and a Booksense Pick for 2005. Heather has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, New York, Details, GQ, as well as been a commentator for All Things Considered, a columnist for Salon, and a senior writer for Fortune Small Business. She has been quoted or Smartbomb has been cited in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, Talk of the Nation, CBS Sunday Morning, Slate, Newsweek, and Business Week. Heather has also moderated or participated in panels for Sundance, The Independent Film Festival, Games for Change, and the Wall Street Transcript as well as spoken on the topic for corporations and universities around the country.

Harris Dew
Harris Dew has worked in film publicity and programming for over 15 years, with stints at New Yorker Films, the San Francisco International Film Festival, the publicity firm Magic Lantern, the Museum of Modern Art and Film Forum. Since 2005, he has been Director of Programs and Promotions at the IFC Center, a 3-screen art house in downtown New York that presents a diverse program of independent, foreign and documentary features, as well as revivals, festivals and special events.

Julie Fontaine
Julie Fontaine is Vice President of Publicity at Miramax Films, where she has recently overseen campaigns for Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Stephen Frears’ The Queen, and Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi. Currently she is working on Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness and Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky. She was previously the Vice President of Publicity and Marketing at Cowboy Pictures, a film distribution company that specialized in the theatrical release of independent films. She is currently on the board of the New York Women’s Foundation and is a member of New York Women in Film and Television. Before working in film distribution, Julie taught film at the University of Colorado, Boulder as well as the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Amy Geller
Amy Geller got her start in film as television field producer and production manager for J. Arnold Productions, whose work is seen regularly on network television, A&E, HBO, MTV, and CNN. Since, Geller has acted as producer and line producer on numerous shorts and documentaries, including the PBS/BBC broadcast docudrama Murder at Harvard, made for American Experience. Geller also produced the Sundance Institute-supported independent feature, Stay Until Tomorrow (2005), a prize-winner at several film festivals. The War That Made America, a four-hour PBS mini-series in January 2006, was Geller’s most ambitious, high-budget production to date, recreating for television the French and Indian War. Geller currently works as a Production Supervisor and Producer for NKP Media in Newton, Massachusetts, producing videos for publishing clients that include Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins, Houghton Mifflin, and Prentice Hall.

Carl Goodman
Carl Goodman is Deputy Director and Director of Digital Media at the Museum of the Moving Image, where he oversees the museum’s use and study of digital media and technology. A recognized authority on digital media and technology, Goodman has served as the Museum’s Curator of Digital Media since 1992. Exhibitions he has organized include DigitalMedia, a gallery of software-based art, and Digital Play, which presents historical arcade and contemporary home video games. Carl also co-produced the interactive exhibits in the Museum’s core exhibition, Behind the Screen. Online projects include the acclaimed The Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials 1952-2004, Sloan Science Cinémathèque, and the upcoming Moving Image Source. Carl also leads the Museum’s Collection Digitization and Access Initiative, the goal of which is to make the Museum’s collection of over 125,000 objects accessible online. Goodman serves on the Board of Directors of Creative Time and Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center.

Ed Halter
Ed Halter is a critic and curator living in New York City. His writing has appeared in Arthur, The Believer, Cinema Scope, Kunstforum, Millennium Film Journal, Rhizome, The Village Voice and elsewhere. From 1995 to 2005, he programmed and oversaw the New York Underground Film Festival, and has organized screenings and exhibitions for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Cinematexas, Eyebeam, the Flaherty Film Seminar, the Museum of Modern Art, and San Francisco Cinematheque. He currently teaches in the Film and Electronic Arts department at Bard College, and has lectured at Harvard, NYU, Yale, and other schools as well as at Art in General, Aurora Picture Show, the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, the Images Festival, the Impakt Festival, and Pacific Film Archive. His book From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games was published by Thunder’s Mouth Press in 2006. With Andrea Grover, he is currently editing the collection Small Cinemas: Experimental Film Exhibition in the United States. He is a founder and director of Light Industry, a venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn, New York.

Molly Haskell
Molly Haskell, author and critic, has written for many publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, Esquire, The Nation, Town and Country, The New York Observer, and The New York Review of Books. She worked at the French Film Office in the Sixties, writing a newsletter about French films for the New York press and interpreting when directors came to America (this was the height of the Nouvelle Vague) for the opening of their films. She then went to The Village Voice, first as a theatre critic, then as a movie reviewer; and from there to New York Magazine and Vogue. She has also served as Artistic Director of the Sarasota French Film Festival, on the selection committee of the New York Film Festival, as associate Professor of Film at Barnard and as Adjunct Professor of Film at Columbia University. Her books include From Reverence to Rape: the Treatment of Women in the Movies (1973; revised and reissued in 1989); a memoir, Love and Other Infectious Diseases (1990); and, in 1997, a collection of essays and interviews, Holding My Own in No Man’s Land: Women and Men and Films and Feminists.

Eugene Hernandez
As the Editor-in-Chief of indieWIRE, Eugene Hernandez oversees all of the company’s editorial publications. In 1996, he co-founded the company and the previous year he co-founded iLINE, an online community for filmmakers, that was the predecessor to indieWIRE. Eugene has participated as a juror and panelist at film festivals worldwide including the Sundance Film Festival, the San Francisco International Film Festival, and the Tribeca Film Festival, as well as many others. He has contributed to FILMMAKER Magazine, Daily Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, The Independent Film & Video Monthly, and RES Magazine. Additionally, he has served as a consultant to the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers (AIVF) and the Creative Capital Foundation and as a funding panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Independent Television Service (ITVS). He is also a regular member of selection committees for the annual IFP/West Independent Spirit Awards.

Tom Kalin
From short experimental video to feature-length narrative film, Tom Kalin has created a critically acclaimed body of work that has screened throughout the world. His debut feature, Swoon, was awarded the Caligari Prize at Berlin, the Open Palm at the Gotham Awards, the Fipresci Prize in Stockholm, and Best Cinematography at Sundance. His work is in the collection of MoMA and the Centre Georges Pompidou and has received support from the Rockefeller Foundation among others. His short films and videos include Third Known Nest, Geoffrey Beene 30, Behold Goliath, Plain Pleasures, and Every Wandering Cloud. As a producer his films include I Shot Andy Warhol and Go Fish. His most recent film as director, Savage Grace, premiered at the 2007 Quinzaine des Realisateurs in Cannes and has screened at many festivals including this year’s Sundance. IFC will release the film on May 30.

Michael Koresky
Michael Koresky is co-founder and editor of the online film journal Reverse Shot, as well as the editorial manager of the Criterion Collection. He also currently writes and assigns weekly reviews for indieWIRE. The former assistant editor of Film Comment magazine, Koresky has also written for Cinema Scope, The Village Voice, Senses of Cinema, Stop Smiling, and Interview. Koresky also served on the foreign-film narrative award committee for 2007’s NewFest: The New York Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, & Transgender Film Festival and co-organized two “Reverse Shot Presents” film series with the 92nd Street Y’s Makor Center.

Donald Krim
Donald Krim has been president of the independent distributor Kino International since 1977. Before that, as the director of United Artists Classics, he established and ran the first studio classics division in the industry. Kino’s classic titles include M, Metropolis, Pandora’s Box, Diary of a Lost Girl and Queen Kelly. Kino has released films by such major filmmakers as Shohei Imamura (The Ballad of Narayama), Andre Techine (Scene of the Crime), Aki Kaurismaki (Ariel, The Match Factory Girl), Michael Haneke (The Piano Teacher), and Wong Kar-wai (Happy Together, Fallen Angels). Recent theatrical releases include Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, Pascale Ferran’s Lady Chatterley, and Joseph Cedar’s Oscar-nominated Beaufort. Krim has won the Mel Novikoff award for contribution to film appreciation from the San Francisco Film Festival (in 2000), the Contribution to Film Preservation Award from Anthology Film Archive (in 2006), and the William K. Everson Film History Award from the National Board of Review (in 2007).

Ellen Kuras
Cinematographer and filmmaker Ellen Kuras has won the Sundance Film Festival dramatic Excellence in Cinematography Award an unprecedented three times: for Tom Kalin’’s Swoon in 1992, and for two of Rebecca Miller’s films, Angela in 1995 and Personal Velocity in 2002. She has also received two Emmy Award nominations: for A Century of Women and Spike Lee’’s 4 Little Girls. She worked with director Michel Gondry on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, and Be Kind Rewind. Other cinematography credits include Blow, I Shot Andy Warhol, and Bamboozled. Her directorial debut, Nerakhoon (The Betrayal), co-directed with Thavisouk Phrasavath, premiered at Sundance in January 2008 and has won prizes at the Ann Arbor Film Festival and the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.

Susan Norget
Susan Norget is the president of Susan Norget Film Promotion, a film publicity and marketing agency committed to representing the work of the world’s most visionary filmmakers. Films the agency has publicized have consistently been honored with top international awards, including two Best Documentary Oscars, a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film, several top Cannes and Sundance awards, as well as a number of Independent Spirit and Gotham awards. Promoting films at major festivals and spearheading over 180 theatrical release campaigns, the company has represented some of the most critically celebrated films of recent years including Oscar winners March of the Penguins and Born Into Brothels, Cannes favorites 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Flight of the Red Balloon, and The Wind That Shakes the Barley, the sleeper hit Once, as well as the acclaimed documentaries Iraq in Fragments, Tarnation, and Control Room.

Gerald Peary
Gerald Peary has been a much-published North American film critic for more than 25 years. His cinema articles have appeared in many newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, and The Boston Globe, and in film periodicals around the world, including Film Comment, Cineaste, Sight and Sound, and Positif. Since 1996, he has been a weekly film critic and columnist for the Boston Phoenix. He is a member of the National Society of Film Critics, and FIPRESCI. He has been president of critics’ juries at many festivals, including Karlovy Vary, Rotterdam, Bangkok, and Vienna. A Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Peary also heads the film program at Suffolk University, Boston. He was a Fulbright Scholar, studying Yugoslavian Film Comedy in Belgrade, and Acting Curator of the Harvard University Film Archive. Since 1997, he has been the curator of the Boston University Cinematheque, bringing filmmakers to BU to discuss their craft. His eight books include co-editing the anthologies, The Classic American Novel and the Movies, The American Animated Cartoon, and Women and the Cinema: A Critical Anthology. His latest book is John Ford: Interviews. He has worked in film production as a story editor for the documentary filmmakers, Errol Morris and Ron Mann, and he has written screenplays in collaboration with the Serbian filmmakers, Slobodan Sijan and Srdjan Karanovic. Several of his original screenplays have been optioned.

Arthur Penn
Arthur Penn is a true legend of the American cinema. From the 1950s through the 1970s Penn forged a unique place for himself within Hollywood through a series of intense and brilliant films that helped revitalize studio filmmaking and reconnect with lost audiences. Penn’s discovery of a new artistic freedom within the commercial industry effectively paved the way for the auteurist cinema defined in the 1970s by Coppola, Friedkin, Scorcese, et al. While retaining a deep concern for quintessentially American themes, Penn also explored a mode of vividly stylized cinema in works such as Mickey One and The Chase that engaged in a crucial dialogue with the French New Wave. Balanced with Penn’s frequent use of overt, almost overripe symbols is his keen sensitivity to the violence endemic throughout American history and society. Penn’s boldest masterpieces such as The Chase, Bonnie and Clyde, Night Moves and Little Big Man were not only critically and, at times, commercially successful films but also landmark cultural events, films that gave an unwavering voice to the zeitgeist of a traumatized nation and the rise and fall of the counter-cultural movement.

A preternaturally talented and intelligent director, Penn has also proven himself on the stage and in television, fields where he remains an acknowledged master, especially for his ability to elicit pitch-perfect yet always surprising performances. One-time advisor to John F. Kennedy for his crucial television debate with Richard Nixon and later head of the Actor’s Studio, Penn’s uncanny ability with actors is proven by the electric and career-defining performances from Marlon Brando, Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, Anne Bancroft, Paul Newman and Gene Hackman that run throughout Penn’s cinema. (Biography from the Harvard Film Archive retrospective Arthur Penn, American Auteur, February 2008).

Click here for a discussion with Arthur Penn from the 1994 Museum of the Moving Image retrospective American Outsiders: The Cinema of Arthur Penn.

Bingham Ray
Bingham Ray has twenty five years of executive experience in all aspects of the film business. In 1991 Ray co-founded October Films a leading film company of that decade. Some of October Films credits include the acclaimed films Secrets & Lies, The Apostle, Breaking the Waves and The Celebration to name but a few. In 2001, Ray was named president of United Artists. During his tenure, UA released the Academy Award winning foreign film No Man’s Land and the Academy Award-winning documentary Bowling for Columbine. Other notable films include Ghost World, Pieces of April and Igby Goes Down, among others. Ray is currently president of Kimmel Distribution, a division of Sidney Kimmel Entertainment. In the past year SKE has produced and or released Talk to Me, Death at a Funeral and two Academy Award nominated films Lars and the Real Girl and The Kite Runner.

Kelly Reichardt
Reichardt has just completed her third feature Wendy and Lucy from the short story Train Choir. The film stars Michelle Williams and Reichardt’s own hound Lucy. In the summer of 2005 Reichardt filmed Old Joy which premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Old Joy was the first American film to win the Tiger award at the Rotterdam Film Festival and opened at the Film Forum in New York City. Reichardt’s first feature, River of Grass, a sun-drenched noir shot in her home town of Dade County, was cited as “one of the best films of 1995″ by The Boston Globe, Village Voice, Film Comment, The New York Daily News, Paper Magazine and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Her follow-up short, Ode, is a super-8 reinterpretation of the Herman Raucher novel Ode to Billy Joe and features an original soundtrack by Will Oldham. Reichardt’s super-8 short Then a Year includes a voice-over collaged from TV true crime shows, while Travisappropriated from a re-organized NPR radio interview with a Portland mother whose son Travis was killed in Iraq. Reichardt is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Bard College.

Andrew Sarris
Andrew Sarris has been a film critic for The New York Observer since 1989. He was a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in criticism and has been an active member of the New York Film Critics Circle for over four decades. He is perhaps best known for explaining and popularizing the auteur theory in the English-speaking world. Before joining The New York Observer, Sarris was a film critic for The Village Voice from 1960-89. He has edited Cahiers du Cinema (1965-67) and served on the editorial board of The Journal of Popular Film and Television. He was a founding member and past chairman of the National Society of Film Critics and has been a member of the Society of Cinema Studies, a member of the American Film Institute, and a juror for the New York Film Festival. His books include, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1925-1968, The Films of Josef von Sternberg, The St. James Film Director’s Encyclopedia, Hollywood Voices: Interviews with Film Directors, and You Ain’t Heard Nothing Yet: The American Talking Film, History and Memory 1927-1949. From 1955-65, he was a story consultant for 20th Century Fox. Sarris recieved an M.A. from from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 1998. He has taught at Columbia, Julliard, Yale, and New York University.

Matt Zoller Seitz
A finalist for the Pulitzer prize in criticism, Matt Zoller Seitz is the backup film critic for The New York Times and the publisher and co-editor of The House Next Door, a website devoted to critical writing on movies and television. From 1995-2006, he was film critic of New York Press and a television columnist for The Star-Ledger of Newark. A Dallas native and a former film critic for Dallas Observer, Seitz is also an independent filmmaker who wrote, directed and edited a dramatic feature, Home, and is currently working on a follow-up project, an epic science fiction movie starring puppets and stuffed animals. He lives in Brooklyn with his two children.

Cynthia Swartz
Cynthia Swartz, co-head of 42West’s Media Marketing Division, joined the firm as a partner in 2005. She previously worked at Miramax, where as executive vice president of publicity she orchestrated publicity campaigns for many of the company’s classic titles, including The Crying Game, The Piano, Farewell My Concubine, Hero, and Shall We Dance. In addition, Swartz spearheaded the company’s awards campaigns, working on such acclaimed films as Pulp Fiction, The English Patient, Shakespeare in Love, Chicago, Gangs of New York, Cold Mountain, The Aviator, and Finding Neverland. In all, Miramax films received more than 150 nominations during her tenure. Swartz also served as Vice President of Publicity in the New York Office of Sony Pictures.

A.O. Scott
A. O. Scott joined The New York Times as a film critic in 2000. Previously, he was a Sunday book reviewer for Newsday, and a frequent contributor to Slate, The New York Review of Books and many other publications. Scott graduated with a B.A. degree in Literature (magna cum laude) from Harvard College in 1988 and was a grad-school dropout from Johns Hopkins, in American Literature. He has also served on the editorial staffs of Lingua Franca and The New York Review of Books. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children.

S. T. VanAirsdale
S.T. VanAirsdale is a senior editor at Defamer and the founder of the New York City film culture site The Reeler. His film writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Village Voice and online at VanityFair and The Huffington Post.

Ryan Werner
Ryan Werner is Vice President of Marketing at IFC Entertainment. He oversees the marketing of all IFC Films releases as well as the marketing and publicity for IFC First Take, the company’s landmark day and date program. Recent and upcoming films include Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, Jacques Rivette’s The Duchess of Langeais, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon, Christoph Honore’s Love Songs, Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely, and Lance Hammer’s Ballast. Prior to IFC, Werner was Head of Theatrical Distribution at Wellspring. He oversaw the marketing, publicity and distribution of the company’s films including Jonathan Caouette’s award-winning Tarnation, Jacques Audiard’s The Beat My Heart Skipped, Cédric Kahn’s Red Lights, Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny, Todd Solondz’s Palindromes, Arnaud Desplechin’s Kings and Queen, and Jean-Luc Godard’s Notre Musique. He was also Head of Theatrical Distribution at Palm Pictures, Vice President of Acquisitions and Distribution at both Magnolia Pictures and Shooting Gallery. For the past five years, he has served as Feature and Documentary programmer for the Woodstock Film Festival. From 2001-05, he was on FILM Independent’s Spirit Awards Committee for Someone to Watch. In 2006, he was selected by The Hollywood Reporter for their Next Gen Award. He lives in New York City.