Bio
Patricia R. Zimmermann is professor in the Department of Cinema, Photography and Media Arts at Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York, USA. She is also codirector (with Tom Shevory) of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival in the Division of Interdisciplinary and International Studies at Ithaca College. She has also held endowed chair appointments as the Ida Beam Professor in Cinema and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa and the Shaw Foundation Professor of New Media in the School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
She is the author of REEL FAMILIES: A SOCIAL HISTORY OF AMATEUR FILM (Indiana, 1995) STATES OF EMERGENCY: DOCUMENTARIES, WARS, DEMOCRACIES (Minnesota, 2000), and coeditor of MINING THE HOME MOVIE: EXCAVATIONS IN HISTORIES AND MEMORIES (California, 2008). She was coeditor with Erik Barnouw of THE FLAHERTY: FOUR DECADES IN THE CAUSE OF INDEPENDENT CINEMA (Wide Angle, 1996).Her book on digital arts, PUBLIC DOMAINS: CINEMAS, HISTORIES, VISUALITIES (Temple University Press, forthcoming), explores the relationship between historiography, political engagements 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. She has published over 200 scholarly research 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 in a wide swathe of international journals ranging from Screen, Genders, Journal of Film and Video, Afterimage, Framework, Asian Communications Quarterly, Cinema Journal, Wide Angle, Cultural Studies, DOX, Film History, Socialist Review, Journal of Communications Inquiry, and The Moving Image.
She has delivered invited lectures and plenary addresses across the globe -- China, Nigeria, Ireland, Hong Kong, Singapore, India, Turkey, Mexico, Luxembourg, 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 , The Journal of Film and Video, The Sixties and The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists. She is currently a trustee of International Film Seminars, the home of the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar. She also has served 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.
She also serves as codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (with Tom Shevory) in the Division of Interdisciplinary and International Studies. FLEFF is a one-week multimedia inter-arts extravaganza that reboots the environment and sustainability into a larger global conversation, embracing issues ranging from labor, war, health, disease, music, intellectual property, fine art, software, remix culture, economics, archives, AIDS, women’s rights, and human rights. www.ithaca.edu/fleff
