Inventing Independent Cinema: A Celebration of Maya Deren, 1917-1961.
On December 18, Professor Richard Peña, Professor of Film at Columbia University's School of the Arts, Former Program Director of the Film Society at Lincoln Center, and Director Emeritus of the New York Film Festival, will be invited to give a talk themed on Inventing Independent Cinema: A Celebration of Maya Deren, 1917-1961.
During this talk, he will explore the life and achievement of Maya Deren, one of the most important American experimental filmmakers and entrepreneurial promoters of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s, by screening and analyzing several of her short works, as well as placing her art and activities within the context of postwar America.
Speaker
Professor Richard Peña
Richard Peña has been at Columbia since 1989, becoming full time in 1996 and being named Professor of Professional Practice in 2003; from 2006 to 2009 was a Visiting Professor in Spanish at Princeton University; from 2015 to 2016 was a Visiting Professor at Harvard University. Professor Peña has also served as the Program Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Director of the New York Film Festival from 1988 to 2012. At the Film Society, he has organized major film series devoted to African, Chinese, Cuban, Polish, Hungarian, Arab, Korean, Japanese Soviet and Argentine cinema.