Biennial Audiovisual Archival Summer School 2021: Lecturers
The list of BAVASS 2021 participants is available HERE.
Robert Byrne
Robert Byrne serves is President of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, a non-profit organization dedicated to educating the public about silent film as an art form and as a culturally valuable historical record. Rob is also a film restorer specializing in early cinema and films of the silent era. Working with film archives and collections worldwide he has led restorations of more than twenty feature films and numerous short subjects. He has also lectured at the Library of Congress, University College Cork, Queen’s University Belfast, The Reel Thing Symposium, and numerous AMIA and FIAF technical symposiums, and publishes regularly on the topics of motion picture restoration and preservation.
Carmel Curtis
Carmel Curtis (she/her/hers) currently works as an archivist in the Moving Image Archive of Indiana University; is a board member of the non-profit Screen Slate, a daily resource for independent, repertory, and gallery screenings in New York City (and beyond); and is a is a proud but distant member of XFR Collective, a volunteer run group that works to increase community access to at-risk audiovisual media. Carmel's previous projects include work with the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Deluxe, Dirty Looks, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York University, and the United Nations.
Oliver Danner
Since 2010 Oliver Danner preserves audio media. He regularly gets contracted by the holders public and private audio collections and also is employed at the German federal film archive. He’s been exploring the field of sound engineering for more than 20 years and since 2015 holds an MA degree in conservation and restoration of audiovisual cultural assets as well as a BSc in media production and -technology since 2008. In 2020 he was accepted as a member to the IASA TC and as a correspondent member to the FIAF TC.
Walter Forsberg
Walter Forsberg works as a filmmaker, archival producer, and media conservator based in Mexico City. His films have screened widely, including at the Sundance, Rotterdam, and Toronto film festivals, and at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. A graduate of NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation master’s program, he has preserved audiovisual collections at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museo Jumex, and the Smithsonian Institution. From 2014-2018, he served as founding Media Archivist at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC. His recent writing on film appears in BlackFlash magazine, the anthology Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film, and the INCITE Journal of Experimental Media where he is a contributing editor. His co-edited issue of the Canyon CinemaZine, about Mexican Cine-Espacios, will be published in early 2022. Walter is Adjunct Faculty at New York University and a 2021-2024 Fulbright Specialist in Library Science.
Caroline Frick
In addition to serving as an Associate Professor in the Radio-TV-Film Department at The University of Texas at Austin, Caroline Frick is the founder and Director of the Texas Archive of the Moving Image. Prior to her work in Texas, Dr. Frick worked in film preservation at Warner Bros., the Library of Congress, and the National Archives. Dr. Frick also programmed films for the American Movie Classics cable channel in New York and served for four years as the President of the Board for the Association of Moving Image Archivists. Her book, Saving Cinema, was published by Oxford University Press.
Tiago Ganhão
Tiago Ganhão is a film restorer and the coordinator of the laboratory of Cinemateca Portuguesa in Lisbon. This job combines his formation in applied chemistry, and photography with his love for Cinema. Working in a photochemical laboratory since 2004 he managed to gain experience with different workflows used to successful preserve and restore our global film History and he is keen to share it. He is a full member of the FIAF (International Federation of Film Archives) Technical Commission since 2016, a consultant in the field of Film Heritage, and a regular speaker in conferences worldwide.
Alejandro Grande
B.A. in Film and Television from Centro de Diseño, Cine y Televisión University where he specialized in Film Production. In 2010, he began collaborating at the Cineteca Nacional, Mexico's national film archive, in the Programming Department where he focused on the acquisition of titles for distribution in Mexico. Years later he became Head of Programming at Cineteca México. After a break to work at the Mexican Film Institute IMCINE, as Head of International Sales, in 2019 he rejoined Cineteca as Head of Distribution and part of the Programming Committee.
Adelheid Heftberger
Dr. Adelheid Heftberger is deputy head of the film department of the Bundesarchiv (Berlin). She has degrees in Russian studies, Comparative Literature and Library- and Information Sciences. Previously she has worked as a cataloguer, archivist and researcher in the Austrian Film Museum (Vienna). She is head of the FIAF Cataloguing & Documentation Commission since 2020.
Dawn Jaros
Dawn Jaros is the Associate Director of Library Conservation at the Margaret Herrick Library where she oversees all preservation and conservation activities for the Library’s collection departments. Dawn completed her graduate studies at Buffalo State College with an M.A. in Art Conservation and Certificate of Advanced Study in Paper Conservation in 2008. She previously held positions at the Art Institute of Chicago, Balboa Art Conservation Center and the National Archives and Records Administration before joining the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, MHL in 2014.
Lars Karlsson
Lars is the head of digital restoration av preservation department at the Swedish Film Institute. The operations started around 2013 and has now grown to a department that annually restores around 50 films. Lars has a master’s degree in Media technology and ever since his thesis work in 2004, which was part of the development of film scanner, he’s been working in the field of film digitization, restoration and preservation.
Reto Kromer
Having graduated in both mathematics and computer science, Reto Kromer became involved in audio-visual conservation and restoration back in 1986. He has been running his own preservation company, AV Preservation by reto.ch, and lecturing at the Bern University of Applied Sciences and the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola in Donostia (San Sebastián). His current research includes colour spaces, look-up tables and codec programming and emulation. Previously he was head of preservation at the Cinémathèque suisse (the Swiss National Film Archive) as well as a lecturer at the University of Lausanne and at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. He served as an AMIA board member during two terms. His work has seen him honoured with an inaugural JTS Award.
Mick Newnham
For the past three decades Mick Newnham has been working with the preservation of audiovisual collections while based at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA).
From 2014 to 2017 Mick was President of the South East Asia Pacific AudioVisual Archive Association (SEAPAVAA). From 2000-2005 Mick was the Chair of the SEAPAVAA Technical Committee.
Mick has also contributed to the work of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF), the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA), and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
Since 1995 Mick has been providing consultancies and training across the globe in audiovisual collection management and preservation on behalf of the NFSA and NGO’s including; UNESCO, SEAPAVAA, ASEAN and ICCROM.
At the University of Melbourne, Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation, Mick presents an elective unit on the preservation of cultural heritage collections.
Per Legelius
Per Legelius works at the Swedish Film Institute leading a team of media technicians who handle all aspects of the digital archiving chain. He develops and maintain inhouse software and workflows handling digitization, mastering and file distribution. He has over 25 years of experience working in the post production industry as an online editor, technical supervisor and DI supervisor. Per is also a member (Film archive representative) of the project team in the technical committee CEN/TC 457 who is developing a framework for long term digital preservation of cinematographic works.
Kasandra O’Connell
Kasandra O’Connell is Head of the IFI Irish Film Archive custodian of Ireland’s national moving image collection and has been working in the cultural sector for 30 years. Before commencing her position as Head of the IFI Irish Film Archive in 2000, she worked in conservation at the National Museum of Ireland. She has a postgraduate qualification in Archival Science, an M.A. in Museum Studies and is currently undertaking PhD research in moving image preservation and policy at Dublin City University. She chairs an Advisory Group on Film Heritage for the Department of Arts, Heritage & the Gaeltacht. She has written about digital preservation and moving image archiving for a number of publications including Film Ireland, History Ireland, Journal of the Society of Archivists, the International Journal of Film Preservation and Alphaville and is a member of the editorial board of The Moving Image Journal. She regularly contributes to television and radio programmes on film and preservation. Her focus in recent years has been devising and implementing the IFI Irish Film Archive’s Digital Preservation and Access Strategy, providing access to the IFI collections via the IFI Archive Player, achieving accreditation under the Museum Standards Programme of Ireland and undertaking large scale preservation and digitisation projects.
Rachael Stoeltje
Rachael Stoeltje founded and serves as the Director of the Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive. She served on the FIAF Executive Committee (2013-2019) and was part of the FIAF Training and Outreach Program Team. She served on the CCAAA (Co-ordinating Council of Audiovisual Archival Associations) (2015-2020). She co-edited the Joint Technical Symposium (JTS) 2016 proceedings and co-organized the JTS 2019 conference in Amsterdam. She currently serves on the Advancement Committee for AMIA (Association of Moving Image Archivists) and the Editorial board for AMIA’s The Moving Image Journal. Most recently, she concluded her role as the Director of the mass digitization for film project at Indiana University that wrapped up in June 2021 resulting in 23,803 digitized film reels. She participants in local and international training and outreach events and initiatives, dedicates herself to mentoring burgeoning archivists in the field and works to bridge the global archival communities in an effort to address our shared challenges.
Pekka Tähtinen
I work at KAVI - National Audiovisual Institute in Helsinki, Finland. I have been the head of digitisation and digital restoration since our in-house film digitisation was launched in 2011. Prior to that I worked as a senior advisor at the Radio and TV Archiving, also here at KAVI. From the beginning our aim in digitisation was to build an on-going process to produce 4K DCP’s and digital preservation copies of the Finnish film heritage. We were one of the first (if not the first) film archives to have a full 4K workflow in-house. This is something we are extremely proud of while simultaneously we are delighted to see so many other institutions taking the same steps since.
My background is in engineering. I'm M.Sc. in Telecommunications Engineering. I majored in Acoustics and Audio Signal Processing at the Helsinki University of Technology. In my free time I enjoy music and sports and spending quality time with my two infants.
David Walsh
David Walsh began his long career as a film archivist at the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in 1975, having studied chemistry at Oxford University. He has established himself as an expert in the preservation and digitisation of film and video and has an active role with the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) having joined the FIAF Technical Commission in 2006 and served as its head from 2011 to 2016. He is now FIAF's Training and Outreach Coordinator and is dedicated to providing training and assistance to film archivists around the world, with a particular interest in how the traditional aspects of film can be preserved in a digital future.
