Rick Altman, Ph.D., is an emeritus professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Iowa where he has taught courses on film sound, film genres, and narrative theory. In recent years he has taught courses on silent film sound and exhibition, Hollywood’s conversion to sound, genre theory, the musical, the films of Rouben Mamoulian, and narrative theory.  His publications include Film/Genre (1999), Winner of the Society for Cinema Studies Katherine S. Kovacs prize for the best film book published in 1999; Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). Kraszna-Krausz Prize runner-up for best 2004-2006 book on photography, film, or media; A Theory of Narrative (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).  He received his Ph. D. from Yale University.

 

Peter Bagrov, Ph.D., is the senior curator at the prestigious George Eastman Museum. He started his career in Russia as a film historian. In 2005-2013 he was a Research Associate at the Russian Institute of Art History. In 2011 received his PhD from the Institute for Cinema Studies in Moscow. In 2013-2017 he was the Senior Curator at Gosfilmofond of Russia, the Russian state film archive. In 2013-2019 he served as the artistic director of the archival film festival “Belye Stolby.”  Since 2005 he has been teaching film courses at various universities, curating retrospectives and giving talks on the lesser-known aspects of the early Russian and Soviet cinema of the 1910s-1960s. He has published a large number of articles on a variety of film-related subjects.

 

Jillian Borders, M.A., is the head of Preservation at the UCLA Film and Television Archive.  Serving in the film preservation field for over 15 years, Jillian has dedicated her career to the Archive, first in its film lab before joining its world-renowned preservation department in 2013. She continues her deep involvement with archival and industry partner collaborations and develops and fosters new community connections. Jillian oversees the restoration of a broad range of titles, including classic Hollywood as well as independently made works that reflect the diversity of UCLA’s collection, the largest university-based collection of moving images. Prior to her appointment, she served as senior film preservationist at UCLA for seven years, committing to photochemical and digital projects spanning the breadth and diversity of film and television history. Jillian earned her B.A. in History and Comparative Literature from the University of Washington and her M.A. in Moving Image Archive Studies from UCLA.

 

Jeffrey Dym, Ph.D., is a professor of history at California State University, Sacramento.  Among his publications is Benshi, Japanese Silent Film Narrators, and their Forgotten Narrative Art of Setsumei: A History of Japanese Silent Film Narration.  Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003.   This is the only comprehensive book written on benshi and Setsumei written in English.  He has been the recipient of a Fulbright Research Scholar in Japan, as well as a Crown Prince Akihito Fellowship, from the Crown Prince Akihito Scholarship Foundation.

 

Jim Doering, Ph.D., is Professor of Music and Chair of the Department of Arts at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, where he teaches music history, music theory, and organ. He holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from Washington University in St. Louis. Doering’s research interests include film music and the American orchestra, and his work has appeared in American Music, Journal of the Society for American Music, The Musical Quarterly, and Notes. In 2008, his scholarship on silent film accompaniment was featured at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where he performed the complete original score to Enrico Guazzoni’s Antony and Cleopatra as part of the Gallery’s Roman Ruins Rebuilt exhibit. His book, The Great Orchestrator(University of Illinois Press, 2013), is a biography of the powerful American music manager Arthur Judson.

 

Paul Sommerfeld, Ph.D., is a senior music reference specialist in the Music Division of the Library of Congress. He holds a B.M. in music theory and composition from Concordia College Moorhead, a M.A. in musicology from Penn State University, a master’s in library science from Catholic University, and a Ph.D. in musicology from Duke University. He has been a lecturer in film music and musicology at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University. Paul’s expertise is in music for film, television, and other media.  His dissertation focused on the music branding, the re-purposing of musical texts, and the creation of layered meaning in film and television.  At the Library, Paul also works extensively with the Music Division’s rare pre-1800 holdings.

Tom Gunning, Ph.D., is an emeritus professor of art history at the University of Chicago.  There, he works on problems of film style and interpretation, film history and film culture. His published work (including approximately one hundred publications) has concentrated on early cinema as well as on the culture of modernity from which cinema arose. His concept of the “cinema of attractions” has tried to relate the development of cinema to other forces than storytelling, such as new experiences of space and time in modernity, and an emerging modern visual culture. His book D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film traces the ways film style interacted with new economic structures in the early American film industry and with new tasks of story telling. He has also written on genre in Hollywood cinema and on the relation between cinema and technology. The issues of film culture, the historical factors of exhibition and criticism and spectator’s experience throughout film history are recurrent themes in his work.

 

Mike Mashon, Ph.D., was head of the Moving Image Section at the Library of Congress from 2005-2023. During this time, he oversaw the construction of The National Audio Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, VA.  Prior to this role, he served as curator at the Library of American Broadcasting and Curator of Moving Images for the Library of Congress. Mike received his B.S. in Microbiology from Louisiana State University, an M.A. in Radio-Television-Film from the University of Texas at Austin, and a Ph.D. in Radio-Television-Film from the University of Maryland.

 

Paolo Cherchi Usai, Ph.D., is a film historian and film curator. He is the senior curator at the Cineteca del Friuli, Gemona, Italy.  Additionally, he has served as senior curator of the motion picture department at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY, the head of preservation projects at the Royal Film Archive, Brussels, Belgium, and a professor at University of Liege and International School for Film Preservation, Bologna, Italy.  He is the founding head of the L. Selznick School of Film Preservation, and a founding member of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival.  Cherchi Usai’s area of special interest is in early cinema, from the late nineteenth century to the early use of sound in films. He is the author of several books on early film including The Vitagraph Company of America (1897-1916), Studio Tesi (Pordenone, Italy), 1987; Burning Passions: An Introduction to the Study of Silent Cinema, British Film Institute (London, England), 1995; Silent Cinema: An Introduction, British Film Institute (London, England), 2000.  His seminal work on D.W. Griffith is The Griffith Project, British Film Institute (London, England), 2000-2002, a four volume work that served as the first complete guide to all of Griffith’s 450+ films. It remains a gold-standard for archival research in the field.

 

Kendra Preston Leonard, Ph.D., is the founder and executive director of the Silent Film Sound and Music Archive. She is a musicologist and music theorist whose work focuses on women and music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and music and screen history. Leonard is the author of The Art Songs of Louise Talma; Music for Silent Film: A Guide to North American Resources; Louise Talma: A Life in Composition; The Conservatoire Américain: a History; Shakespeare, Madness, and Music: Scoring Insanity in Cinematic Adaptations, as well as numerous book chapters and articles.  She has received many awards, grants, and fellowships for her work, including the 2017-18 Rudolph Ganz Long-Term Fellowship at the Newberry Library; 2016-17 Harry Ransom Center Fellowship; the 2016 Janet Levy Award from the American Musicological Society; a 2016 American Music Research Center Fellowship; the 2016 Society for American Music Sight and Sound Subvention; the inaugural Judith Tick Fellowship from the Society for American Music (2013-2014); and the Thornton Wilder Fellowship at the Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (2009).

 

Patrick Miller, Ph.D., is an emeritus professor of music theory at the Hartt School at University of Hartford.  He was formerly the chairman of the music theory program there.  Since 1982 Patrick Miller has performed his symphonic-style piano accompaniments for silent film screenings at colleges and universities throughout New England. He has studied silent film music at the George Eastman Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Library of Congress and has accompanied the masterworks of American and international silent cinema. Since 2001, he has accompanied silent film screenings for the April in Paris Film Festival at Cinestudio, Trinity College, Hartford, CT.