Board Members
Thom Andersen has lived in Los Angeles for most of his life. In the 1960s, he made short films, including Melting (1965), Olivia’s Place (1966), and --- ------- (1967, with Malcolm Brodwick). In 1974 he completed Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer, an hour-long documentary film about Muybridge’s photographic work. It was restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive in 2013. In 1995, with Noël Burch, he completed Red Hollywood, a critical video essay about the film works created by the victims of the Hollywood Blacklist. Their work on the history of the Blacklist also produced a book, Les Communistes de Hollywood: Autre chose que des martyrs, published in 1994. In 2003 he completed Los Angeles Plays Itself, a three hour-long movie about the representation of Los Angeles in movies. It was voted one of the 50 best documentaries ever made in a Sight & Sound critics’ poll. In 2010, he completed "Get Out of the Car," a short 16mm portrait of Los Angeles. In 2012, he directed Reconversão, an HD video about the work of Portuguese architect Eduard Souto Moura, the winner of Pritzker Prize in 2011. In 2015, he completed The Thoughts That Once We Had, a personal history of cinema loosely inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s books on cinema.He has taught at the California Institute of the Arts since 1987. He was Filmforum programmer from 1995 to 1999.
Winona Bechtle is an arts professional with varied experience in project management, strategic development, and partnership cultivation. Currently serving as the Director of Partnerships at the historic Bob Baker Marionette Theater, Winona's professional focus centers around the implementation of fundraising campaigns, community engagement initiatives, and strategic stakeholder management. With prior roles encompassing Development Assistant at Machine Project, and Exhibition Programs Management at the Armory Center for the Arts, she has served an instrumental role in strategic planning and organizational growth in experimental programmatic spaces. She earned her M.A. in Arts Management from Claremont Graduate University and a B.A. with Honors in Media Studies and Spanish from Scripps College. Winona joined the board of Los Angeles FIlmforum in 2023, and the advisory board of Vidiots in 2022. She is a lifelong resident of Los Angeles and looks forward to continuing to support its underrepresented artistic spaces.
Jheanelle Brown (Vice-President) is a film curator and arts educator based in Los Angeles. Her curatorial practice is committed to honoring, expanding, and empowering Blackness in visual and filmic media. Her specific interests are oriented around experimental and non-fiction film and video, the relationship between musicality and cinema, political film and media, and West Indian film/video. She is currently guest co-curator for Black Radical Imagination with Darol Olu Kae, an associate programmer for Los Angeles Filmforum, and a curriculum developer for the Centennial High School film club. Jheanelle is co-curator, with Sarah Loyer, for Time Is Running Out of Time: Experimental Film and Video from the L.A. Rebellion and Today.
Tuni Chatterji (Secretary) is an artist, filmmaker and educator based in Los Angeles, California. Her movies have been screened around the world at venues including the Dhaka International Film Festival, The Rotterdam International Film Festival, Los Angeles Filmforum, Echo Park Film Center, UCLA, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and upcoming at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Tuni received a Fulbright scholarship for research and production on Okul Nodi (Endless River), an experimental documentary about the boatman's song of Bangladesh and has recently been commissioned by the Echo Park Film Center, supported by the Mike Kelley Foundation, to make a new film. Currently, she works as a production manager in the Oral History Projects at the Academy of Motion Pictures. Tuni received an MFA in filmmaking from the California Institute of the Arts and a BFA in painting from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Scott Foundas is a feature-film development and acquisitions executive for Amazon MGM Studios, where he has overseen such movies as Suspiria and Manchester By the Seaas well as the upcoming The Burial (starring Jamie Foxx and Tommy Lee Jones), The Idea of You (starring Anne Hathaway) and Holland, Michigan (starring Nicole Kidman). Prior to joining Amazon, he served as Chief Film Critic for Variety and for Village Voice Media. As a programmer, he spent six years as a member of the New York Film Festival selection committee and three years as Associate Program Director for the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
Alison Kozberg (President) has worked with experimental and independent film for over a decade and has produced film programs, symposia, and special events for organizations including the Getty Research Institute, Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), and the Walker Art Center. A specialist in the history of film exhibition, Alison holds a Master’s Degree in Cinematic Arts from the University of Southern California. She has been on the board of Los Angeles Filmforum since 2012 and was head researcher for the Filmforum project "Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles 1945-1980" and founding project director for "Ism Ism Ism: Experimental Cinema in Latin America".
Jesse Lerner is a documentary filmmaker, curator, and writer based in Los Angeles. His short films Natives (1991, with Scott Sterling), Magnavoz (2006), and T.S.H. (2004), and the feature-length experimental documentaries Frontierland/ Fronterilandia (1995, with Rubén Ortiz-Torres), Ruins (1999), The American Egypt (2001), Atomic Sublime (2010), and The Absent Stone (2013, with Sandra Rozental) have won numerous prizes at film festivals in the United States, Latin America, and Japan, and have has screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City, the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, and the Sundance, Rotterdam, and Los Angeles Film Festivals, and many other venues. Washington’s National Gallery, New York’s Anthology Film Archives, and Mexico’s Cineteca Nacional have presented mid-career surveys of his films. His books include The Maya of Modernism, F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing (with Alex Juhasz), The Shock of Modernity, Ism Ism Ism: Experimental Cinema in Latin America (with Luciano Piazza), and The Catherwood Project (with Leandro Katz). His critical essays on photography, film, and video have appeared in Afterimage, Cabinet, Film History, History of Photography, La Pusmoderna, The Spectator, Visual Anthropology Review, Wide Angle, and other media arts journals, anthologies and exhibition catalogues. As a curator, he has organized exhibitions for the Flaherty Seminar, Mexico’s National Palace of Fine Arts, and The Mexperimental Cinema, a traveling retrospective of 60 years of avant-garde film and video from Mexico. He is a professor in the intercollegiate media studies program of the Claremont Colleges.
Diego Robles is an educator, artist and filmmaker inspired by independent film, video stores, public libraries, comics, and a lot of live and recorded music. He's a Film School graduate of the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television, as well as an MFA graduate of CalArts's School of Film/Video & the School of Critical Studies. Robles currently teaches Art Education and on the in’s and out’s of Art & Design Internships at San Diego State University; he also currently teaches New Genres, Visual Studies, and Chicanx Art at CSU San Bernardino. His current visual and media artwork inquiries into the philosophical underpinnings of how we interpret our inner and outer world during different points in our lives, and the impact this has on how our human and non-human relationships evolve/adapt/struggle through our changing economic, environmental, political, and social climate.
Rani Singh is the Director of the Harry Smith Archives. Based in Santa Monica, California, Singh focuses on strategic planning and legacy management for artists and artists’ estates. Previously she worked as Director of Special Projects at Gagosian Gallery and for many years at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles in Modern & Contemporary Collections.
Mark Toscano is a filmmaker, curator, and film preservationist based in Los Angeles. Since 2003, he has worked at the Academy Film Archive, where he specializes in the curation, conservation, and preservation of artists’ films. He works with the collections of over 100 filmmakers, and has overseen the conservation and preservation of hundreds of films, including work by Stan Brakhage, Barbara Hammer, Chick Strand, Tacita Dean, Penelope Spheeris, the Whitney brothers, Gus Van Sant, Pat O’Neill, Suzan Pitt, Satyajit Ray, the Maysles, Les Blank, Robert Downey, and many others. He has curated and presented programs of archival work at numerous venues, including MoMA, Arsenal, Eye Filmmuseum, Tate Modern, and festivals in Rotterdam, London, Oberhausen, Zagreb, and elsewhere. He has lectured at various universities on experimental film and archiving, and teaches the History of Experimental Animation at CalArts. His films, which have shown in a very select scattering of bewilderingly generous venues, are available for rental from Canyon Cinema and Light Cone.
Board Members Emeritus
Terry Cannon (1953-2020) founded Los Angeles Filmforum (née Pasadena Filmforum) in 1975 when he was 21 years old and served as Executive Director for eight years. Cannon concurrently founded and edited Follies: A New Community Journal, a publication committed to amplifying local voices and championing artists as workers. As Filmforum’s Executive Director, Cannon curated programs including “Show for the Eyes,” the first mail art film exhibition, “Films Found in a Box,” and “El Ojo Apasionado: The Passionate Eye,” along with creating our mission of promoting a greater understanding of media art, and the role of the artists and curators who create and present it, by providing a forum for independently produced, noncommercial work which has little opportunity of reaching the general public. Over eight years he hosted scores of filmmakers from throughout the country and world, including Barbara Hammer, Sara Kathryn Arledge, Les Blank, Bill Brand, Betzy Bromberg, Jim Broughton, Shirley Clarke, Fu-Ding Cheng, Tony Conrad, Neelon Crawford, Donna Deitch, Jules Engel, Roberta Friedmand & Grahame Weinbren, Michael Guccione, Howard Guttenplan, Herbert Jean de Grasse, Vincent Grenier, Louis Hock, Jim Hubbard, Taka Iimura, Jon Jost Helene Kaplan, Marjorie Keller, Kurt Kren, Karl Krogstad, George & Mike Kuchar, George Landow, Standish Lawder, Tom Leeser, Lenny Lipton, Angela Ricci Lucchi & Yervant Gianikian, J.J. Murphy, Jenny Okun, Pat O’Neill, William Scaff, Paul Sharits, Chick Strand, Willie Varela, James Whitney, Bruce Wood, and Jud Yalkut. Filmforum would oftentimes give each filmmaker a coin squashed on the neighboring railroad tracks. In this period he gave multiple filmmakers their first solo shows, and also gave Mark Cantor his first shows to present jazz films, which Cantor has continued to do to this day. Cannon also provided a space for the first installation by David and Diana Wilson in 1980, Tying Dogs’ Legs, which helped inspire the development of the renowned Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City. Cannon served as president of the board of the Jurassic for many years.
In 1984 he founded Spiral, a quarterly publication featuring writings and artworks by experimental filmmakers. He also founded the Baseball Reliquary, a nonprofit dedicated to fostering an appreciation of American art and culture through the context of baseball history, which continues to this day. As a valued librarian assistant in Alhambra and Pasadena, he initiated an enormous number of special events that brought a wide range of guests to the area.
David E. James is the author or editor of several works on independent American film, including The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles. Together with Adam Hyman, he edited Alternative Projections: Experimental Film In Los Angeles, 1945-1980. His most recent works are Rock ‘N’ Film: Cinema’s Dance With Popular Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016) and the forthcoming Power Misses II: Cinema, Asian and Modern.
Berenice Reynaud taught film history, theory and criticism at the California Institute of the Arts. She was the Co-curator of the film/video program at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) in Los Angeles, and a correspondent for the San Sebastian International Film Festival (Spain) and the Viennale (Vienna, Austria). She has curated a number of film/video series for the UCLA Film & Television Archive (Los Angeles), the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume (Paris).
Staff
Adam Hyman (Executive Director) is currently Executive Director and Programmer for Los Angeles Filmforum, serving those roles since 2003. He was Project Supervisor and co-programmer for Filmforum’s Pacific Standard Time project, Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles, 1945-1980. Together with David James, he edited the resulting book. He was project supervisor for Filmforum’s second Pacific Standard Time project, Ism, Ism, Ism: Experimental Cinema in Latin America. A native Angeleno, he has been a documentary filmmaker for the past twenty years, producing and/or writing a variety of historical and archaeological documentaries that have aired on the History Channel, the Learning Channel, the Travel Channel, and others. He co-produced the Oscar-nominated documentary "Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience," the PBS version of which won two Emmys. He co-produced “Worse Than War,” a documentary on genocide globally, which premieres on PBS in April 2010. He regularly does archival image research and clearance for a variety of documentaries. He has an MFA in Film Production from the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television.