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63 FIFTH AVENUE,
NY NY 10003

Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography & Social Thought at the New School incubates advanced transdisciplinary research and practice at the intersection of social theory and design and fosters dialogue on related themes across the university.

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Leo Goldsmith

Leo Goldsmith is an Assistant Professor of Screen Studies in the Department of Culture & Media at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School, and has lectured on media and film at CUNY Brooklyn College, New York University, and Harvard University.

 

Leo Goldsmith is an Assistant Professor of Screen Studies in the Department of Culture & Media at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School, and has lectured on media and film at CUNY Brooklyn College, New York University, and Harvard University. His critical writing has appeared in 4 Columns, e-flux, Cinema Scope, and The Brooklyn Rail, where he was film editor from 2011 to 2018. He is a co-author of Keywords in Subversive Film/Media Aesthetics (Wiley 2015), by Robert Stam with Richard Porton, and is currently writing a book about the filmmaker Peter Watkins (Verso).

A film programmer and curator, Leo is a programming advisor for the New York Film Festival, and has organized exhibitions and film programs at the Museum of the Moving Image, Los Angeles Filmforum, the Uppsala International Short Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, UnionDocs, and CAC/Contemporary Art Centre (Vilnius, Lithuania). He served as a creative consultant and archival producer for the films Ad Astra (d. James Gray, 2019) and The Universe in a Grain of Sand (d. Mark Levinson, 2024). He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Cinema Studies at NYU in 2018.

British filmmaker Peter Watkins has spent a half century developing techniques for a unique mode of cinematic historiography: a project of collective historical reenactment that relies on the participation of non-actors and the use of deliberate anachronism to generate a form of storytelling about the past that is both speculative and embodied. Beginning in the 1950s—with his early involvement with amateur theater groups and his training in documentary filmmaking at the BBC—and across a dozen feature films, Watkins developed an unique set of creative and social methodologies which deploy cinema as a context through which to construct sites of contestation and political activism among non-professionals and average citizens. For this fellowship, I will explore the filmmaker's theories of media and collaborative aesthetic techniques developed over the course of his career—a set of co-creative strategies which, crucially, extend beyond the moment of filming and into the moment of reception and the site of exhibition to form a new relation to contemporary media and the historical past.