AIM EXPERT TRAINERS
SHPEND BENGU: Universiteti Europian i Tiranës/UET, Albania. Sphend has over 20 years of experience teaching multimedia design, graphic design, and painting as well as photo and paper conservation. Shpend is particularly focused on Albanian cultural heritage in the global network, and continues to research and document the historical circulations of Albanian art, architecture and media in a global framework. Shpend has volunteered his time and expertise to the AQSHF, and to these workshops. He will be leading the workshop sessions on photo, paper, and poster conservation.
KATE DOLLENMAYER: Audiovisual Archivist at the Wende Museum in Culver City, California, USA. Kate manages and curates a collection of small-gauge films, slides, videos, and sound recordings from East Germany and the Soviet Union. She brings to this work more than ten years’ experience as an educator, filmmaker, film programmer, and museum professional, with particular research interests in the use of animation in educational film and the industrial and labor history of the moving image medium. Prior to joining the staff of the Wende Museum in 2013, she taught film and video as a member of the Bennington College faculty. Kate holds a BA from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts, She has presented her work at the Neutra VDL Studio and Residences, the Museum of Modern Art, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Mass Art Film Society, the East German Summer Film Institute at Smith College, the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research, and the Kinderakademie Fulda. Kate will lead film handling and inspection sessions and co-teach the projection workshop, with a focus on 16mm projection.
SKIP ELSHEIMER: A/V Geeks, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. Skip is the founder of A/V Geeks. He has been collecting and digitizing film and video for nearly 20 years. He consults and presents on grassroots digitizing efforts using off-the-shelf, older technologies and open source software. He recently did a 24 hour digitizing marathon when he transferred over 100 16mm films and streamed it live online to an audience of over 3000 viewers. Skip is the leader of the technical team for the AIM Workshops, and had a large hand in designing the workshops curriculum, selecting the equipment, hardware, and software that the participants will train on during the sessions. Skip will lead many hands on sessions and a "digitization boot camp" during the AIM workshops. Skip is also a member of the board of the Center for Home Movies. With Skip's guidance, Albania will host its first Home Movie Day this year in Tirana, at the COD gallery.
NANCY GOLDMAN: Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA USA. Nancy is Head of the Film Library and Study Center at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), which holds collections of books, stills, posters, and documentation, and catalogs and provides research access to BAMPFA’s films and videos. Nancy holds an M.L.I.S. from UC Berkeley. She serves on the Cataloguing and Documentation Commission of the International Federation of Film Archives and regularly teaches seminars on film cataloging. Nancy will lead the AIM Workshops cataloging and documentation training sessions, and discuss potentials for participation in union catalogs such as the European Film Gateway.
RETO KROMER: AV Preservation by reto.ch. Lausanne, Switzerland. Reto became involved in audio-visual conservation and restoration in 1986. From 1998 to 2003 he was Head of Preservation at the Swiss Film Archive, in charge of cataloguing, conservation and restoration of the film collection. Since 2004 he has been running his own preservation companies, providing comprehensive services that encompass the whole range of moving image preservation. From 2007 to 2015 he was a lecturer at the University of Lausanne, and from 2011 to 2015 also at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. He has been a lecturer at the Bern University of Applied Sciences since 2002. His courses cover the conservation and restoration not only of audio-visual content but also audio-visual carriers, usually with a focus on technical issues and movie picture film. His current research includes color spaces, look-up tables and codec programming and emulation. He is serving as a board member of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) and the Albanian Cinema Project (ACP). In the past Reto aided the Serbian film archives in managing a serious problem with mold growth in their film collections. Reto is a founding member of the ACP Board. He will lead several workshop sessions on audio-visual file formats and will lead hands-on training sessions with the software MediaInfo and FFmpeg.
ANDREA McCARTY: Connecticut, USA. Andrea is an independent Archives Consultant, working with moving image archives on issues of preservation and accessibility. She has experience in non-profit, academic and commercial archives and has served as Director of Archives and Asset Management at HBO. She is an active Board member of both the Albanian Cinema Project and Northeast Historic Film in Bucksport, Maine. Andrea has a Masters degree in Comparative Media Studies from MIT and is a graduate of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at the George Eastman Museum. Andrea has assisted ACP to launch their crowdfunding campaign for a film scanner for Western Balkan film archives. During the AIM workshops she will lead sessions in archives management, and she will aid in the hands on digitization sessions.
STEPHEN PARR: ACP; Oddball Films: San Francisco Media Archive, California, USA. Stephen, founder of Oddball Film+Video has a long history of presenting and archiving the unusual. Since the 1970s he has produced and documented live performances of John Cage, Christian Marclay, Nam June Paik and The Ramones, screened his signature pop culture montages from the Danceteria in New York to the Moscow Cinematheque and created found footage based films such as “Historical/Hysterical?” and “Eurphoria!” which have screened worldwide in venues such as The Anthology Film Archives in NY, Jaaga in Bangalore and the Leeds International Film Festival. His company, Oddball Film+Video, the largest film archive in Northern California, has supplied eclectic footage for countless feature films, documentaries, music and media projects worldwide. He curates an eclectic weekly film series-Oddball Films- at his archive and is a frequent presenter at film and media seminars and symposiums. He is an active member of the Association of Moving Image Archivists. He is also the director of the San Francisco Media Archive, a non-profit institution dedicated to the acquisition and preservation of culturally significant film and related media. Stephen will lead sessions in curating and content management for the AIM Workshops.
ANDY UHRICH: Indiana University Libraries, Bloomington, Indiana, USA. Andy is the Film Archivist, Assistant Librarian
IU Libraries Moving Image Archive. He is a former member of the Center for Home Movies Board of Directors, and he serves on the board of the Northwest Chicago Film Society. He is pursuing his PhD at IU and also teaches there. Andy, a self-described “AV geek,” became interested in film at a young age and his appreciation for film only grew as he continued his education. In college, he recognized how films and videos “document cultural values and can be records of everyday life in addition to being entertainment or art.” His work experiences after graduation opened his eyes to archives’ active preservation of old film and put him on the path toward becoming a film archivist. Andy’s training at NYU’s MIAP program, real world internship experiences, and encouragement from IU professors and other mentors led him to his current position within the Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive. During the AIM Workshops Andy will lead sessions in film handling and repair, and 35mm and 16mm projection. 
ALLIE WHALEN: NYU/MIAP, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA. Allie is an audiovisual archivist who specializes in the preservation of international, independent media. She holds an MA in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation from New York University and is a Sound Preservation Engineer at the UNC Southern Folklife Collection. Her work includes the preservation of underground, activist, and community collections with projects at UCLA Preservation Program, Anthology Film Archives, Democracy Now, Czech National Film Archive, Cinemateca Uruguaya, Museo del Cine, and Señal 3 Televisión Comunitaria.
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KOUSHIK PRASANTA BHATTACHARYA: Quality Matters, Navi Mumbai, India. Since 1991 Koushik has worked in the fields of advertising and television production. He has worked as an editor, producer, and concept designer. Through his work in Indian television he became interested in film and media preservation. He left the commercial industry to pursue film to digital preservation and restoration full time and on his own terms. He is self-taught in the field of film preservation, and he continues to study and learn about the field, while working as a partner on a variety of digital film preservation and scanning projects in India, the US, and Europe. Koushik traveled to Tirana from India with his Lasergraphics ScanStation Personal, and taught the workshop practicum sessions in 35mm film scanning. Koushik has generously donated his time, and stayed on two weeks longer in Albania, after the workshops ended, in order to help the Albanian National Film Archives (AQSHF) learn the principles of digital scanning workflows. During this time, he has worked on some important newsreels and documentaries in the AQSHF collections that were chosen by the AQSHF staff as historically significant materials in need of digitization.
NATHANIEL DUSHKU: Boston Diva Productions, Los Angeles, CA, USA. Nate began his career as an actor, and studied acting at NYU. Over the past several years Nate has shifted his focus to producing and directing. He spent nearly ten years working on the documentary Dear Albania (2015) as both director and producer. This film premiered on American Public Television to great acclaim. In the film, Nate and his sister Eliza travel to Albania where they explore 15 unique cities throughout the country. They discover Albania’s present, its past and hear about its hopes for the future. For the siblings, the voyage to their ancestral home becomes a cultural, historical and personal discovery. Nate and Eliza are currently producing a biopic on the controversial American artist Robert Mapplethorpe. Nate fell in love with the Albanian film archives and forged strong bonds with the staff while working on Dear Albania, and will return to Tirana for these workshops to support efforts to save and preserve this precious film heritage.
JONATHAN FARBOWITZ: NYU MIAP, New York, USA. Jonathan is a media archivist whose interests include preserving malware and other digital anomalies, archiving media related to social movements, the treatment of footage of Indigenous peoples in archives, and developing open-source software. A graduate of NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program, he has worked on collections at Anthology Film Archives, Carnegie Hall, the Museum of Modern Art, and Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Vassar College.
ANA GRGIC: CBS, London, England; Balkan Cultural Centre, Split, Croatia. Ana is a film scholar and researcher, She holds a PhD from the University of St. Andrews (Scotland) and a Masters Degree from the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris III. She specializes early cinema, archives and cultural memory in the Balkans. She has also curated film programs such as the Peter Greenaway film programme at the Australian Cinémathèque (2009), and the ‘The View from Elsewhere’ at the Queensland Art Gallery (2009). Prior to embarking on an academic career, she worked in film production at Cinecittà (Rome, Italy) and visual effects in London’s Soho district independent studios. Ana is co-chair for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Central/East/South European Scholarly Interest Group. She is also president of the cultural association Balkan Cultural Centre (Croatia), an ambassador of Balkans Beyond Borders, and jury member at the altcineAction! Film Festival. She has published in The Film Festival Yearbook 5: Archival Film Festivals (2013), Divan Film Festival Symposium Papers (2014, 2015), Cinemas of Paris (2015), Frames Cinema Journal, and East European Film Bulletin. She co-edited a special issue on Albanian cinema for KinoKultura. Ana joined the board in 2016 and since 2015 she has worked with ACP to program screenings and roundtables. Ana is the co-convenor of the AIM Workshops.
REGINA LONGO: Founding Director, ACP; Associate Editor Film Quarterly Journal, New York, USA. Regina is the Associate editor of Film Quarterly and teaches in the School of Film and Media Studies at SUNY Purchase. She has taught in the department of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the Film and Media Studies department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Regina is a professional film and media archivist, who received her degree at the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at George Eastman Musem and then went on to work at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC, where among other projects, she was responsible for managing the work restoring and reconstructing the outtakes of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. She received her PhD from the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and has published articles in The Journal of the Moving Image, Screening the Past and California Italian Studies. She also writes the "Page Views" column for Film Quarterly. Regina has devoted her professional skills to aiding archives at risk, and serves as a special consultant to the Albanian National Film Archives. She also serves as Co-chair of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) Conference Committee, Regina is the co-convenor of the AIM Workshops and played a major role in developing the workshop curriculum.
JURIJ MEDEN: George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY. Jurij was born in Ljubljana and grew up attending the Slovenian Cinematheque, where he later served as the curator of film exhibitions. He has twenty years of international experience in curating film programs, lecturing, publishing and writing about cinema. He currently works as the curator of Film Exhibitions at the George Eastman Museum. Jurij will lead sessions in film curation and programming during the AIM Workshops.
GABOR PINTER: Magyar Filmlabor, Budapest, Hungary. Gabor is an award winning film director. As head of worldwide restoration projects at the Hungarian Filmlab, he has been managing and nurturing full digital and analogue film restoration for about 15 archives worldwide. These restorations have regularly screened at Cannes Classics, Grand Lyon Lumiere, Cinema Ritrovato and Giornate del Cinema Muto. Gabor is currently persuing his PhD in film restoration ethics. The best- known restorations on which he has collaborated include Michael Curtiz’s The Undesirable (1914), Miklós Jancsó’s The Round-up (1966), and the Manaki brothers’ full cinematic heritage. Gabor will lead workshop sessions in restoration and preservation ethics and practice, and will facilitate the conversation between the two directors of Balle Per Balle (1979), the 35mm Albanian film which the workshop participants will begin to scan under the careful guidance of the AIM technical team.
DAVID WALSH: Imperial War Museum (IWM), London, England. David is Head of Digital Collections at IWM. David has worked at IWM since 1975, having studied Chemistry at Oxford University. From an initial project to study the decomposition of cellulose nitrate film, he has established himself as an expert in the preservation and digitization of film and video, and is currently Head of the Technical Commission of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF). His work includes teaching film archivists from around the world through FIAF training courses and at the annual FOCAL International Footage Training Week. At present he is responsible for IWM’s strategy for digitization and for long-term preservation of digital media. During the AIM Workshops David will lead sessions on preservation policies and strategies, and he will facilitate a roundtable discussion on the potential for ongoing collaborations among Western Balkan film and media archives.
LINDSAY ZARWELL: US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, USA.Lindsay has worked as an archivist in the Steven Spielberg Film & Video Archive at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum since 2000. She conceived and regularly develops the archive’s public access database, acquires and catalogs original films, and manages several significant film preservation and digital projects. She has recently focused on interpreting and presenting the Museum’s amateur collections and co-published an essay on home movies titled “Yes, There Was a World: Prewar Jewish Life on Film.” During the AIM Workshops Lindsay will take part in sessions on cataloging and documentation, and on dealing with sensitive subject matter in audiovisual archives
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