Board of Directors
Brian L. Frye
Brian L. Frye is the Spears-Gilbert Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky College of Law. His scholarship focuses on intellectual property, nonprofit organizations, and art law. He is also a filmmaker and film programmer. He currently runs the Silver City Grocery microcinema in New Orleans with Maybell Romero.
Lian Ladia
Lian Ladia is a curator and organizer. She is currently Curator of Exhibitions and Programs at The David Ireland House in 500 Capp Street, San Francisco. Ladia holds a Postbaccalaureate in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute, an MA in Curatorial Studies from Bard College, and in 2015, participated in De Appel’s Curatorial Programme in Amsterdam, co-curating works by Metahaven, Lav Diaz, and Wu Tsang, among others. From 2010 to 2015 Ladia was based in Southeast Asia, co-founding the curatorial collaborative Planting Rice and working with artist-run Green Papaya Art Projects. She was also co-curator for Japan Foundation’s Media/Art Kitchen, researching projects in Southeast Asia and Japan. Her recent curatorial projects involve the first US exhibition of film collaborative Zakkubalan and the presentation of their collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto. Apart from Ladia’s work with time-based media she actively organizes community engagement with critical issues on art, hxstory, and archives leading to community empowerment. She has contributed to the presentation of Carlos Villa’s work at the Singapore Biennale, the urban renewal and social justice archives of SOMA immigrant organizations, as well as the accessibility of archives in conceptual art at The 500 Capp Street Foundation through newly formed artist residencies. Ladia is a board member of Clarion Alley Mural Projects, People Power Media, and is part of the San Francisco Art Commission’s Monuments and Memorials Advisory Committee.
Patricia Ledesma Villon, Secretary
Patricia Ledesma Villon is a moving image archivist, curator, and researcher from the southeastern San Francisco Bay Area. She currently works as the Bentson Archivist and Assistant Curator of the Moving Image department of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She has processed audiovisual collections and worked on archival initiatives for the Prelinger Archives, the Center for Asian American Media’s “Memories to Light” home movie project, filmmaker and scholar Trinh T. Minh-ha, and the Philippine Film Archive. Her archival practices focus on the intersections of photochemical filmmaking and preservation, theories of audiovisual archiving, digital preservation, artist-made cinema and exhibition, and the history of moving image technology. Patricia received a B.A. in Media Studies from UC Berkeley and is a graduate of UCLA’s MLIS program with a specialization in Media Archival Studies, where she conducted research on the role of commercial, archival, and artist-run film laboratories in the moving image archiving and preservation field. She is also a member and co-organizer of Light Field, an annual exhibition of recent and historical moving image art on film, an active member of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, and an at-large member of the artist-run Black Hole Collective Film Lab in Oakland, California.
Jonathan Marlow
Jonathan Marlow is an occasional curator, composer, cinematographer, and intermittent film producer and filmmaker with a handful of award-winning shorts and feature-length projects to their credit. Prior to concurrent roles as Chief Strategy Officer of PROJECTR and Executive Director of PARACME, Marlow was (or continues-to-be) affiliated with numerous film festivals (including Telluride, Crossroads, AVFest, and Camera Obscura), film institutions (IFS [aka Flaherty Seminar], Consolidated Works, Northwest Film Forum, San Francisco Cinematheque) and film distribution companies (notably Amazon, VUDU, Fandor, Kanopy, and others). In addition to Marlow’s articles and interviews for numerous online and print publications, they are known to frequently host screenings throughout the world showcasing remarkable films which are otherwise generally unavailable elsewhere.
Michael Renov, President
Michael Renov is Professor of Critical Studies and Vice Dean for Academic Affairs at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. He is the author of Hollywood’s Wartime Woman: Representation and Ideology and The Subject of Documentary, editor of Theorizing Documentary, and co-editor of Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, Collecting Visible Evidence, The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies, and Cinema’s Alchemist: The Films of Péter Forgács. In 1993, Renov co-founded Visible Evidence, a series of international and highly interdisciplinary documentary studies conferences that have, to date, been held on four continents. He is one of three general editors for the Visible Evidence book series at the University of Minnesota Press, which has published 25 volumes on various aspects of nonfiction media since 1997. In 2005, he co-programmed the 51st annual Flaherty Film Seminar, a week-long gathering of documentary filmmakers, curators, and educators, creating 20 screening programs and filmmaker dialogues on the theme “Cinema and History.” In addition to curating documentary programs around the world, he has served as a jury member at documentary festivals including Sundance, Silverdocs, the Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival, Brazil’s It’s All True, and the International Environmental Festival of Film and Video, also in Brazil. He has taught graduate seminars at the University of Stockholm and Tel Aviv University and has led documentary workshops in Jordan for the Royal Film Commission and in Cyprus. Renov’s teaching and research interests include documentary theory, autobiography in film and video, video art and activism, and representations of the Holocaust.
Lynne Sachs
Lynne Sachs makes films, installations, performances, and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics, and layered sound design. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, she searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with every new project. Lynne discovered her love of filmmaking while living in San Francisco where she worked closely with artists Bruce Conner, Ernie Gehr, Gunvor Nelson, Barbara Hammer, Craig Baldwin, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. Sachs has made over 25 films which have screened at the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, and Toronto’s Images Festival among others. They have also been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, Walker Art Center, Wexner Center for the Arts, and other venues nationally and internationally. The Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival International Nuevo Cine in Havana, and the China Women’s Film Festival have all presented retrospectives of Sachs’s films. Lynne received a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts.
Steve Seid
For 25 years, Steve Seid was a Film and Video Curator at the Pacific Film Archive, at UC Berkeley. He organized over 1,000 programs of video art, film, and new media for the PFA’s public programs. Seid also oversaw an ongoing video preservation project and for ten years conducted annual workshops on visual literacy for high school teachers. He has taught video aesthetics and history courses at the University of California, Berkeley, San Francisco State University, the California College of Arts, and the San Francisco Art Institute. Following on the ambitious preservation of videotapes from the National Center for Experiments in Television (1967-1975), Seid curated Videospace (2000), a gallery exhibition dedicated to the first TV Lab. His large-scale program, Whose Side Are You On?: The Border, toured Brazil under the sponsorship of Itau Cultural. He co-curated the first museum retrospective of Ant Farm, the ‘60s/’70s art collective and creators of Cadillac Ranch and Media Burn, which toured internationally through 2006. Seid also curated the 52nd Robert Flaherty Film Seminar which took place at Vassar College in spring, 2006 and the Stan Brakhage Symposium, 2009. Radical Light, a 50-year history of moving image art from the San Francisco Bay Area, made its appearance in 2010 as both a co-edited book (University of California Press) and a film/video exhibition that traveled to New York, Chicago, Houston, Portland, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis. In 2013, Seid worked with the Menil Museum and the Berkeley Art Museum to co-curate Silence, a gallery exhibition honoring John Cage’s 100th birthday. Soon to be released will be the restoration of Steven Arnold’s gender-defying Luminous Procuress, a 1971 feature-length film starring the Cockettes.
Jeffrey Skoller, Treasurer
Jeffrey Skoller is a writer and filmmaker. His films, video, and photography have been exhibited internationally. Screenings and exhibitions include: The Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; Museum of the Moving Image, NY; JP Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, Whitney Museum, NY; P.S. 1, NY; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; Flaherty Film Seminar, NY; Arsenal Kino, Berlin; Mannheim Film Festival, Germany; The Latin American Film Festival, Havana; National Film Theatre, London. His essays and articles on experimental film and video have appeared in numerous books, artist catalogues, and in journals including Film Quarterly; Discourse; Afterimage; Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Cinematograph, among others. He is the author of two books Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film (University of Minnesota Press) and POSTWAR: The Films of Daniel Eisenberg (Blackdog Press). Skoller was one of the founding faculty members of School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Film/Video/New Media Dept, and director of Cinema and Media Studies program at Wellesley College. He is currently Associate Professor of Film & Media at UC Berkeley.