Steven Ricci (1952-2020)

Steven Ricci during the 1997 FIAF Congress in Cartagena, Colombia.

It is with great sadness that we inform you of the passing of film archivist, historian and educator Steven Ricci on 16 October 2020 in Los Angeles.

Steve was a long-time FIAF colleague, having served on the FIAF Executive Committee from 1993-2003, including a term as FIAF Treasurer from 1999-2001 and Secretary-General from 2001-2003. During his years of leadership within FIAF, he was a tireless advocate for the promotion and broad use of archival collections in exhibitions and new media.

Steve did his masters and doctoral work in Film and Television Studies at UCLA. An expert on Italian cinema of the pre-WW2 era, his publications include The Mexican Cinema Project (1994), Hollywood and Europe: Economics, Culture and National Identity, 1945-95 (1998), and Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922-1943 (2008). In the early 1980s he was a curator for the Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema in Ancona and Pesaro, Italy, and later Director of the American Film Institute’s National Video Festival. Steve worked for many years at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, where, as the Head of Research and Study he was instrumental in creating the Moving Image Archives Studies program at UCLA in 2001. As the program’s Founding Director, he taught a new generation of archivists in the first such graduate degree program in the United States. Many of the MIAS graduates are now working successfully as curators and heads of archives throughout the moving image community.

Gregory Lukow