Skip Elsheimer
Skip Elsheimer is the founder and curator of the A/V Geeks Educational Film Archive in Raleigh, NC. He has a BA from the College of Design at NC State University. In the early 1990s, he began collecting 16mm educational films and now has over 23,000 films in the archive. He also acquired film telecine equipment and has been transferring film and video materials from his collection and for clients such as the Internet Archive, Duke University, NC State Archives and Stanford University. He is an avid supporter of Home Movie Day, sponsoring the event in North Carolina since its beginning in 2003 and creating Home Movie Day Bingo – a fun way to engage audience members with participants.
Albert Steg
Albert Steg is a freelance archivist and film collector living in Cambridge, MA. He hold Masters degrees in Philosophy (Edinburgh University) and English (Boston University). In 2004 he left his position as head of the English Department at the Winsor School in Boston to pursue a career in moving image archiving. After completing the Selznick School program at George Eastman House in 2005, he reorganized the film collection of the Baseball Hall of Fame. A co-chair of the AMIA Small Gauge and Amateur Film Interest Group, his primary film interests are in small-gauge and ephemeral materials, reflected in his work on the Kodascope Collection at GEH and on his own collection of itinerant, educational, and erotic / stag films, as well as home movies. An avid Filemaker Pro designer, he maintains the database of screenings for the Giornate del Cinema Muto at Pordenone and provides custom database solutions for collections management.
Dwight Swanson
Dwight Swanson resides in Baltimore and maintains the home office of the Center for Home Movies. He has a B.A. in history from the University of Colorado and an M.A. in American Studies with an emphasis on popular and material culture from the University of Maryland. His initial training was in photographic history and museum studies. Since graduating from the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at the George Eastman House he has served as the archivist for regional film and video collections at the Alaska Moving Image Preservation Association, Northeast Historic Film and Appalshop, as well as working on projects at the Human Studies Film Archives and Historical Society of Pennsylvania. He is a specialist in amateur film and regional film production and has lectured and written extensively on home movies and amateur film, including presentations at the Orphan Film Symposium, the Northeast Historic Film Summer Symposium, the University Film and Video Association, and the Association of Moving Image Archivists’ annual conferences. He is a past member of the National Film Preservation Board, and is past co-chair of the Association of Moving Image Archivists’ Small Gauge and Amateur Film Interest Group and the Regional Audio-Visual Archivists’ Interest Group.
Katie Trainor
Katie Trainor currently works as the Film Collections Manager at The Museum of Modern Art. She is a graduate of the L.Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at the George Eastman House. Her introduction to the archival world was her employment as Archive Manager of the Harvard Film Archive from 1993-2000. Since has since been the Director of Operations at the Jacob Burns Film Center and managed the IFC Center (NYC) from 2005-2008. In addition to being an archivist, Katie is an archival film projectionist. She has worked at film festivals all over the world practicing and professing the skill of projection and presentation. She is an active member of AMIA and FIAF.
Andy Uhrich
Andy Uhrich is a PhD student in Indiana University’s Communication and Culture department where he researches the history of media audiences and amateur film/video production. He has a MA from New York University’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (NYU-MIAP) program where he studied the conservation the films and slides used by non-theatrical itinerant film lecturers active in the first decade of the twentieth century. As a graduate student at NYU-MIAP he interned at Anthology Film Archives and the New York Botanical Garden’s Mertz Library. Prior to attending NYU-MIAP, he worked as an archivist at Chicago Film Archives where he focused on the conservation and public exhibition of small gauge collections that document Chicago’s diverse communities, contentious politics, and creative amateur/industrial/artistic filmmakers. While he often credits his interest in film preservation to a love of the film object gained from his decade long experience working as a projectionist, the honest truth is it all goes back to learning how to thread a 16mm projector when he joined the audiovisual club in the second grade.
Molly Wheeler
Molly Wheeler is an Archivist at the Yale University Beinecke Manuscript and Rare Book Library. Prior to working at Yale, she was the Archivist at The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, where she processed the two artists’ papers, sound recordings, and films for nearly four years. While pursuing her MSIS in Archives and Preservation at the University of Texas at Austin, she worked at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center where she built an audio preservation lab and established the audio reformatting program. She organizes the Home Movie Day for Connecticut in New Haven and volunteers to preserve local small film collections. She is an active member of the Association for Moving Image Archivists and Society of American Archivists.
