Prelinger Archives is in the final year of a three-year grant for mass-digitization of its film collection funded by Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web. Since the start of the project, Prelinger Archives staff have scanned over 3 million feet of film and uploaded over 2000 items, while collectively developing practices of inclusive and reparative description to allow multiple avenues into a vast trove of moving images. This curated online screening will highlight rarities and treasures within the collection that have inspired, delighted and bewildered staff. The speakers, all Prelinger Archives staff, will each share experiences from the project as footage is screened and will speak to working with a unique collection that contains a wide array of materials (outtakes, home movies, warped films). The screening will be followed by a moderated Q&A.
Presenters (in order of appearance):
Emily Chao is a filmmaker based in the Bay Area. Her films have screened at Viennale, IFFR, Sheffield DocFest, BAMPFA, MoMI, Wexner Center for the Arts, and elsewhere. She is a founding member of Black Hole Collective Film Lab in Oakland, CA and co-programmed Light Field, an international exhibition of moving image art from 2017-2024. She is from San Jose, California and earned her MFA in Film/Video at the California Institute of the Arts.
Kristin Lipska is an archivist specializing in audiovisual media and digitization workflows. She is currently Digital Asset Manager at the Prelinger Archives working on a three-year film digitization project. Previously she was Digital and Media Archivist a the San Francisco Symphony and Project Coordinator at California Revealed. She earned a Masters of Library and Information Science from San Jose State University and developed skills in video digitization and QC as an intern in the preservation department of the Bay Area Video Coalition. Kristin has contributed to several Home Movie Day events in the San Francisco Bay Area since 2012 as both a film inspector and as a projectionist.
Jen Miko is a Film Scanner at Prelinger Archives. She is an ardent archivist with a long history of working with silver-based images. Jen is a graduate of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation, and has worked with many Bay Area film preservation organizations over the years. Recently, in association with the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, she completed full restorations of several silent film titles. She served as Interim Executive Director at the Niles Essanay Film Museum and has also held positions on the archives team at Zoetrope Productions. As co-founder and former principal of Movette Film Transfer her passion for amateur and small-gauge cinema flourished as she accumulated decades of film-handling experience.
Megan Needels is an archivist based in San Francisco, California. They are a graduate of the media archival studies MLIS program at UCLA and have worked at a number of San Francisco Bay Area archives including Canyon Cinema, San Francisco Cinematheque, Oddball Films, and the GLBT Historical Society.
Kate Dollenmayer lives and works on Lisjan (Ohlone) land in Richmond, California. Currently a film archivist at Prelinger Archives, Kate previously worked at the Academy Film Archive and the Wende Museum of the Cold War. Kate is also a filmmaker and volunteer at Home Movie Days and Community Archiving Workshops.
Adrianne Finelli is an artist and archival film technician based in the Bay Area. She is currently Project Manager at Prelinger Archives and has been scanning films with the Archives since 2016. Previously she worked as a media specialist in the Department of Film & Media at UC Berkeley, as a film projectionist at SFMOMA, and has taught art and film courses at various universities. Adrianne holds an MFA in Media Arts from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and is from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
This presentation is free and open to everyone. Simply register below to join.