Patricia Zimmermann

Bio

Patricia R. Zimmermann is professor in the Department of Cinema and Photography at Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York, USA. She is the author of REEL FAMILIES: A SOCIAL HISTORY OF AMATEUR FILM (Indiana, 1995) and STATES OF EMERGENCY: DOCUMENTARIES, WARS, DEMOCRACIES (Minnesota, 2000).

She was coeditor with Erik Barnouw of THE FLAHERTY: FOUR DECADES IN THE CAUSE OF INDEPENDENT CINEMA (Wide Angle, 1996). Her forthcoming book, coedited with Karen Ishizuka, is MINING THE HOME MOVIE: EXCAVATIONS INTO HISTORIES AND MEMORIES (University of California Press). Her book on digital art, DIGITAL MEMORIES: CINEMAS, HISTORIES, VISUALITIES (Temple University Press, forthcoming), explores the relationship between historiography, political trauma, and digital art practices.

With the late Erik Barnouw, Ruth Bradley, and Scott MacDonald, she coedits the WIDE ANGLE BOOKS series for Temple University Press, a series dedicated to documenting and analyzing the histories of the international nonprofit media arts sectors. Her many scholarly articles and essays on film history and historiography, documentary and experimental film/video/digital arts, amateur film, political economy of media, and digital culture theory have been published widely, both in the United States and internationally.

She has delivered invited lectures and plenary addresses across the globe -- Canada, Colombia, Latvia, France, Wales, Russia, the Netherlands, England, and Germany -- and throughout the United States. As a journalist, her writing on media arts and media public policy has been published in The Independent, Gannett Newspapers, Lola, Afterimage, Main, Lingua France, Search for a Common Ground, CommonDreams.org, and Filmmaker.com

Currently, she serves on the editorial boards of the journals Wide Angle and The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists. She also serves on the national boards of Women Make Movies, Northeast Historic Film Archive (Maine), Konscious.Com, and Search for a Common Ground Film Festival (an international non-governmental organization dedicated to conflict resolution). She served as vice president of International Film Seminars, the arts organization sponsoring the renowned Robert Flaherty Film Seminars.

Working extensively as a curator and programmer, she has curated the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar several times, including a retrospective on American documentary history, a documentary summit between Glasnost and American documentarians and scholars in Riga, Latvia, and "Explorations in Memory and Modernity,” as well as other film, video, new media exhibitions, and artist's residencies. Her curated programs have screened nationally and internationally at a variety of museums, conferences, and film festivals.

At Ithaca College, she has curated the Women Direct Film, Video, and New Media Series -- the longest running feminist media series on the East coast -- for the last 22 years. With colleagues across the Ithaca College campus, she co-curates Cinema on the Edge, an interdisciplinary initiative to bring together media artists, ideas, intellectuals, and cultural productions to engender collective debate and spirited inquiry into a variety of themes and contemporary issues.

Education

• Ph.D., Communication Arts, December, 1984, University of Wisconsin, Madison
• M.A., Communication Arts, 1979, University of Wisconsin, Madison
• B.A., with High Distinction, 1976, University of Iowa, Iowa City
• Major: English, Broadcasting and Film
• Honors Program and Degrees with Honors
• Citation for Excellence in Creative Writing

Books

• States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000)
• Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), Art and Politics of the Everyday Series.
• Mining the Home Movie: Excavations into Historical and Cultural Memories, anthology co-edited with Karen Ishizuka (Berkeley: University of California Press, in press).
• Digital Memories: Cinemas, Visualities, Histories (Temple University Press, under contract, forthcoming).
• The Flaherty: Fifty Years in the Cause of Independent Cinema anthology coedited with Erik Barnouw, Ruth Bradley and Scott MacDonald (in progress)

Selected Publications

• A Festschrift in Honor of Erik Barnouw, coedited with Ruth Bradley, Wide Angle, 1998, Vol. 20, No. 2.
• The Flaherty Film Seminars: Four Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema, special quadruple issue of Wide Angle, coedited with Erik Barnouw, 1996, Vol. 17, Nos. 1-4.
• Soviet and American Documentary Theories, special international issues monograph of The Journal of Film and Video, coedited with Michael Selig, Vol. 44, No. 1 & 2, Spring/Summer 1992.

Recent Scholarly Articles

• “Morphing History into Histories: From Amateur Film to the Archive of the Future,” The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archives, Spring 2001, 109-130
• “Matrixes of War”, Afterimage, January/February 2001, 18-23
• “Transnational Digital Imaginaries,” Wide Angle, Vol. 21, No. 1, 149-167
• “Holding on to the Real,” Afterimage, September 2000, 11
• “Transnational/National Digital Imaginaries: CD-ROMs, Web Sites and Digital Video,” coauthored with John Hess, Mesh: A Journal of Electronic Culture, “Cyberbully”, http://www.experimenta.org. October 1999.
• “Spheres of Action: Chick Flicks,” Afterimage, Vol. 26, No. 6, pp. 14, May 1999
• “Generations: A Late Twentieth Century Festschrift,” coauthored with Ruth Bradley, Wide Angle, Vol. 20, No. 2, 1-9
• “Processing Trauma: The Media Art of Daniel Reeves,”Afterimage, Vol. 26, No. 22, Sept./Oct. 1998, 11-13
• "Transnational Documentaries: A Manifesto," coauthored with John Hess, Afterimage, Jan./Feb. 1997, 10-14
• "Geographies of Desire: Cartographies of Gender, Race, Nation and Empire in Amateur Film," Film History, Vol. 8, No. 1, Spring 1996, 85-98
• "Looking for Buddha," The Future is Handmade: The Survival and Innovation of Crafts, Prince Claus Fund Journal, Fall 2003, Amsterdam

Editorial Work

• Wide Angle Books, series editor with Ruth Bradley, Erik Barnouw, and Scott MacDonald. Books documenting the histories of national and international nonprofit media organizations. Temple University Press
• Editorial Board, Wide Angle
• Editorial Board, The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists

Journalistic Writing

• The Independent
• Afterimage
• Gannett Newspapers
• Lola
• Search for a Common Ground www.sfcg.org
• Lingua Franca
• Common Dreams www.commondreams.org
• Filmmaker.com
• Main

Boards

• Member, Committee for the Erik Barnouw Fund for Humanist Scholars, Robert Flaherty Seminars, 2002
• Advisory Board, Search for a Common Ground Film Festival, Washington, D.C., and Brussels, Belgium, 2001 to the present
• Advisory Board, www.konscious.com, 2000-2003.
• National Advisory Board, Women Make Movies, 1997-2003.
• National Advisory Board, Northeast Historic Film, Maine, 1999-2003.
• 7th Art Cinema Corporation, Ithaca, New York, 2001-2004
• Advisory Board, Vermont International Film Festival, 1997-2000.
• Vice President, Robert Flaherty Documentary Seminars, International Film Seminars, 1990-1993.
• Trustee, Robert Flaherty Documentary Seminars, International Film Seminars, 1989-1994.
• Board Member, University Film and Video Association, 1989-1991.
• Advisory Board, Center for African American Archival Preservation

Selected Curatorial Projects

• Co-Organizer, War: Search for a Common Ground Film Festival, Ithaca College, April 8-12, 2002
• Curator, Inaugural James B. Pendleton Artist in Residence, feature filmmaker Deepa Mehta, Ithaca College, April 3-7, 2001.
• Co-Curator with Barbara Adams and Christina Lane, 20th Anniversary Women Direct Film, Video, Digital Festival, spring 2001.
• Co-Curator with Gina Marchetti, Office of Multicultural Affairs Artist-in-Residencies
• Co-Curator with Gina Marchetti, Film Programming for “Reverberations: Music of the African Diaspora,” Center for Race, Culture, and Ethnicity, Ithaca College, fall 2000 and spring 2001.
• Chair and Curator, Screening Committee, Society for Cinema Studies National Conference, Chicago, Illinois, March 9-12, 2000.
• Co-Curator with Gina Marchetti, Film Programming for “Discussion Series on Islam”, Center for Race, Culture, and Ethnicity, Ithaca College, fall 1999.
• Co-Curator with Gina Marchetti, Cinema on the Edge Program, Department of Cinema and Photography
• Juror, Documentary Division, 25th Annual Athens Film and Video Festival, Athens, Ohio, May 5-8, 1998.
• Juror, Digital Media 25th Annual Athens Film and Video Festival, Athens, Ohio, May 5-8, 1998.
• Co-Programmer with Michelle Materre, “Exploration in Memory and Modernity,” 43rd Annual Robert Flaherty Seminar, Ithaca College, October 1997.
• Curator, Inaugural Skip Landen Professional in Residence, Daniel Reeves (installations, retrospective, master classes), Ithaca College, October 1997.
• Curator, "The Other Centennial: 100 Years of Amateur Film," Pacific Film Archive, University of California-Berkeley, March 1996.
• Co-Curator with Erik Barnouw, “40th Anniversary Retrospective” for Flaherty Film Seminar, August 1994.
• Curator, “Home Movies as the Eyes of the Empire,” Pacific Film Archives, spring 1992.
• Co-programmer, Women Direct Film Series, a series of new work by women with screenings of films and visiting filmmakers, spring 1982 to the present.
• Planning Committee, Robert Flaherty Film Seminar U.S./Soviet Documentary Film Summit, "The Children of Vertov and Flaherty," Riga, Latvia, USSR, September 1990.
• Steering Committee, Visible Evidence Conferences on Documentary, 1995 to the present.

Research Fields

• Film history and historiography
• Social and political theory of media
• Documentary and experimental film/video/digital/installation
• Amateur film and media history
• Feminist film theory
• Political economy and public policy of cinema, media, and digital media
• Digital culture theory

Courses

• Introduction to Film Aesthetics and Analysis
• Nonfiction Film Theory
• American Film
• Digital Hollywood(s)
• Transnational Cinemas
• Political Economies of Hollywood and Independent Media
• Hollywood Histories
• History and Practice of Film Festivals
• Practicum in Film Festivals
• Global Entertainment Industy and Digital Arts Practices
• Practicum in Film Festivals (on-line)

Consulting

• Independent Television Service
• National Association of Media Arts and Culture
• John Simon Guggenheim Foundation
• John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
• New York State Council on the Arts
• Library of Congress Film Preservation Act Selection Committee
• British Columbia Film Archive and Record Service
• Northeast Historic Film
• Rockefeller Foundation

Live Performances and Scores for Silent Cinema

• Arctic Requiem, Nanook of the North (1922), with Ritsu Katsumata, violin and Louise Mygatt, soprano
• Within Our Gates (1920) Revisited and Remixed, with Fe Nunn Quartet
• Manifesto for Digital Memories, remixed and music, with Simon Tarr, computer, and David Rhoads, African Drumming
• Performances at Museum of Modern Art, Vassar College, Ithaca College, University of South Carolina