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About Us
Advisory Board
David Sterritt
David Sterritt, chair of the National Society of Film Critics, is a film professor at Columbia University – where he also co-chairs the University Seminar on Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation – and an adjunct professor of humanistic studies and art history at the Maryland Institute College of Art. He is also professor emeritus of theater and film at Long Island University.
David is chief book critic of Film Quarterly, contributing editor and film critic for Tikkun, contributing writer at Cineaste and MovieMaker, and member of the editorial boards of Cinema Journal, the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, the Journal of Beat Studies, and the Hitchcock Annual, and his program David Sterritt with Films in Focus is heard on WHDD and RobinHoodRadio.com each week.
Before his early retirement in 2005 he was film critic for The Christian Science Monitor for almost forty years, and he served twice as chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle during that time. He has a PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University. His books as author and editor include The Films of Alfred Hitchcock (Cambridge University Press), The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible (Cambridge University Press), Robert Altman: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi), Guiltless Pleasures: A David Sterritt Film Reader (University Press of Mississippi), Mad to Be Saved: The Beats, the ‘50s, and Film (Southern Illinois University Press), The B List (Da Capo), The Honeymooners (Wayne State University Press), and several others. His writing has appeared in Cahiers du cinéma, The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, IndieWire, Film-Philosophy, Journal of American History, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, Film Comment, The Huffington Post, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Framework, Moving Image Source, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Film International, PopMatters, Senses of Cinema, Beliefnet, Cinema Scope, CounterPunch, and many other publications as well as many edited collections.
David has been a member of the New York Film Festival selection committee, film critic of NPR’s All Things Considered, and a theater critic for Variety, and he has served on film festival juries in Moscow, Vienna, Toronto, and elsewhere. He has lectured at such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Harvard Film Archive, and he is moderator of The Cinema Club in Washington, DC.
Testimonials
'The new Film Festival Academy initiative is to be very much welcomed by all film festival professionals and anyone interested and involved in the increasingly central role played by film festivals in the international cinema industry; this is definitely the right thing at the right time and promises to be an exciting and important development that will be of great service to all of us working in the film festival arena.'
'The creation of the Film Festival Academy is a very important step in the ongoing process of consolidation and exchange on the European festival scene. I wish all possible success to this important initiative.'
'The unswerving positive response from film festivals, professionals and academics regarding the launch of the Film Festival Academy comes as no surprise. Sharing between academia and industry is essential in developing highly-trained film professionals and we look forward to the collaboration between film schools, film institutes, festivals and other film industry partners through this unique platform.'
'The Film Festival Academy has a great potential to become a truly valid platform for creative film festival professionals willing to share knowledge and experience on a collaborative basis. This initiative should be welcomed with enthusiasm and excitement.'
'The enormous growth of film festivals – in number, location, diversity, and artistic influence – is accelerating by the day. But not until now has their importance to global culture been matched by an organization with the cinematic acumen, media savvy, networking skills, and expert leadership needed to provide top-level support, training, information, and connectivity for participants in all areas of festival activity, from programmers and publicists to filmmakers, academics, and critics. The arrival of the Film Festival Academy is the most exciting development in years for moving-image professionals everywhere.'
'The Film Festival Academy offers a much needed interchange of views between filmmakers, festival programmers and academics doing research on film festivals. That this interchange takes place not in the academy but at festivals themselves will be a huge boon to film festival scholarship and to an important sharing and deepening of the perspective of those interested in not only theorizing but also intervening in the continued growth of these events which play such a crucial part in the disseminating of a global cinema and in the breaking down of commerical barriers.'
'To focus on film festivals, not in opposition to but in articulation with critical and scholarly thought, is what world cinema needs in order to be understood in all its complexity. The Film Festival Academy deserves our applause and support for providing, for the first time, a common platform for festival professionals, critics and passionate spectators.'
'Do Film Festivals need an Academy in this day and age? The answer is, resoundingly, yes! A complex mixture of the professional and the cultural, the economic and the cinephilic, film festivals today are increasingly complex beasts – and no festival is an island unto itself. Connected in a tight web of international exchanges, comparisons and manœuvres, festivals are all about giving value to particular films or particular types of films – and finding, or creating, the audiences for them. The new Film Festival Academy is ideally placed to integrate the already widely scattered field of researches, discussions, trainings and co-operative interrelationships occurring within and between the literally thousands of film festivals in the modern globe. It is a new world on every level – from the challenge of projection formats to the politics of curating – and the Film Festival Academy will open the doors to it.'
'The role of the film festival in today's digital world is constantly being re-evaluated and debated, but it's clear that film festivals are still as relevant and important as they have ever been. The Film Festival Academy should provide an important focus for the rich and diverse amount of film festivals in the world while giving festival practitioners an important outlet for networking and collaboration.'
'The inauguration of the Film Festival Academy brings important and long overdue attention to film festivals as cultural locations for the traffic in filmmaking, from glitterati events with red carpets, to those that shed light on human rights abuses, to the world-building projects of activist communities.'
'The Film Festival Academy has my full support. It is amazing that in a market overflowing with all kinds of professional training it has taken until today to come up with a simple and great idea: high level opportunities for the exchange of ideas and programmes for learning more about the complex art and the technical skills of running a film festival. Anybody who has participated in any of the rather dubious endeavours that were made in this field before will appreciate the non-profit approach of the Film Festival Academy; anybody who knows its founders will trust their professional knowledge and personal integrity. I will support the Film Festival Academy in every possible way.'